This list, put together for LAB by Camila Vergara Ruiz on the 10 year anniversary of the Ayotzinapa case, gathers informative resources to help us understand the forced disappearance of 43 students in Iguala in 2014. The list includes books, a podcast, a web platform and a documentary film.
On the night of September 26, 2014, students from the all-male Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college in the state of Guerrero entered the city of Iguala, a stop on their journey to Mexico City to join the annual commemoration of the 1968 student massacre. They commandeered five buses for the journey, a tactic neither the students nor the bus companies were strangers to – the deeply political normalistas (students of a rural teachers’ college, which are known in Mexico as normales) lacked the funds or the vehicles to travel en masse when their interventions called for it, and thus they were known to strike up deals with drivers and temporarily rent buses. This time, however, the buses were quickly blocked off by police vehicles and the students mercilessly attacked until the early hours of 27 September, resulting in the murder of three, the grave wounding of two, and the disappearance of 43 more.1)Though often not included in tallies of victims of the event, three further non-normalistas were killed by police in their brutal, frenzied attack, and about 40 others injured.
The tragedy and the ineffectual investigation that followed it would become an indictment of the Enrique Peña Nieto administration (2012-18) and a watershed moment in modern Mexican history, inspiring protests around the world as well as reckonings with the country’s history of impunity and state violence. Families of the disappeared students have continued to search for their sons and brothers, and have stood firm in their skepticism regarding the state’s investigations.
Indeed, rigorous journalistic work and independent forensic research, together with the tireless organizing of the boys’ families, has made inroads where the state investigation has failed, despite overwhelming risk and obfuscation. It is only thanks to these efforts that we’ve been able to establish timelines of the event and its immediate aftermath, present possible motives for the disproportionate response to the taking of these buses, and, importantly, confirm the involvement of the Mexican military, debunking the official investigation’s initial conclusions along the way.
10 years since that night, this list gathers together the fruit of just a fraction of this work, as well as resources that reflect the mass mobilization, expressions of solidarity, and efforts to preserve memory that we’ve seen since, proof that, even when the state cannot be relied upon to deliver justice, students, families, and civilians will continue to demand it. Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos! [You took them alive, we want them back alive].
1. Paula Mónaco Felipe, Ayotzinapa: Horas eternas (Ediciones B, 2015)
Written by a Mexico-based Argentinian journalist and published just a year after the event, this book provides a gripping hour-by-hour narrativized account of the 26th, and includes the initial responses of the families of Ayotzinapa. The heart of the book is Monaco Felipe’s accompaniment of the families and survivors as they began to make sense of the tragedy and campaign for its proper investigation, described with depth and sensitivity by a writer who has herself experienced the disappearance of loved ones and been involved with disappeared persons’ collectives. The book also contains tender biographies and photographs of the 48 victims, filled with memories from their parents and friends, which have been translated into English by volunteers at London Mexico Solidarity.
For now, Ayotzinapa: Horas eternas is only available in Spanish. A free ebook is available for download via Brigada para leer en libertad.
2. Anabel Hernández, A Massacre in Mexico (Verso, 2018, trans. John Washington)
Written in forced exile in the USA due to harassment and threats, the investigation behind this book has been crucial in constructing a plausible explanation for the brutal attack on the normalistas, including finding strong evidence in support of the argument that the buses were, unbeknownst to them, transporting large quantities of heroin, under the protection of the army battalion based near Iguala that cooperated with local organized crime. Based on two years of research, over 100 interviews, and access to invaluable sources and classified documents, the book lays out a detailed picture of the mechanisms of impunity that often reign in Mexico, establishing the roles of municipal, state, and federal police, the military, federal officials, and organized crime in perpetrating the attack or subsequent cover-up, and helping to wholly refute what families of victims refer to as the ‘historical lie’, the initial story and arrests that came out of investigations under Peña Nieto’s government.
A Massacre in Mexico is available in English and in Spanish. A website dedicated to the investigation, with a significant archive of Hernández’ data, can be found here.
3. Forensic Architecture, ‘Ayotzinapa: A Cartography of Violence’ platform
This project, commissioned by the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense and the Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, is a testament to the incredible independent research conducted on the case thus far, allowing for a comprehensive 3D mapping of actors – from students, to police, to soldiers, to media, to witnesses – and their activity on the night of the 26 and morning of the 27 September.
It presents an up-to-date reconstruction of the events, which can admittedly become dense in written form, in a clear, interactive format, allowing users to focus on smaller portions of the crime scene and track the movements and communication of particular actors minute by minute. The site also provides the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes reports (Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, or GIEI, assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate the case) used to build the tool, plausible reconstructions of deleted security camera footage, and other relevant documents, in both Spanish and English.
4. Dir. Enrique García Meza, ‘Ayotzinapa: El paso de la tortuga’ (2018)
‘Ayotzi vive, vive! La lucha sigue, sigue!’
Directed by Enrique García Meza and produced by TV UNAM and Guillermo del Toro, among others, this documentary contains interviews with several survivors and families as well as members of the GIEI investigation. It of course provides first-hand accounts of the night itself (borrowing from the Forensic Architecture reconstruction), but it is especially valuable for its capturing of the philosophies and activities of the normalistas – the community values and political education instilled in the rural normales, their conviction in the social role and importance of rural educators, and their rootedness in the rural environment, often in the backdrop of the interviews. It also follows the work of the GIEI Investigation and independent researchers and journalists’ butting of heads with state officials, and includes affecting footage of normalistas and families’ marches as they continue in their struggle for justice.
The documentary is currently available to watch on Netflix.
5. Tanalís Padilla, Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Duke University Press, 2021)
Established as a means to train teachers in the peripheries in the decades following the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the rural normales have long been sites of political struggle, as well as targets of repression, closures, funding cuts, and vilification. Rather than becoming agents for consolidating the peasantry into patriotic subjects of the modern Mexican nation, rural normalistas developed a culture of collective action and class consciousness, still committed to promises of the Revolution like land reform and free education. The book presents a history of these schools from their inception, through the populist education policies of the 1930s and 1940s, to the guerrilla struggles and state terrorism from the 1960s and 1970s on, through to often tense protests over keeping the normales open today, serving as an essential resource for grounding the Ayotzinapa case in the key traditions, tactics, and language invoked by both students and the state, which has continuously worked to infiltrate and persecute them.
The book is available in English and Spanish. The English ebook is available open access.
6. Laura Castellanos, Mexico Armado: 1943-1981 (Ediciones Era, 2007)
A history of armed struggles between guerilla groups and the Mexican state, Mexico Armado is another useful guide to understanding the history of Guerrero and the context of normalistas’ engagement with authorities. Castellanos dedicates a large section to Guerrero and decades of peasant struggle in the state, as well as to the responses of severe violence, disappearances, and torture on the part of the state, including the infamous death flights of the ‘Dirty War’, the evidence for which is still being uncovered today. The book’s Guerrero chapters also introduce the important figure of Lucio Cabañas, an iconic militant campesino and graduate of the Ayotzinapa normal presumed to have been killed by the military, who holds a special place in the school’s imaginary, his face and words being depicted on Ayotzinapa’s walls and often invoked on its placards today.
The book is available in Spanish.
7. John Gibler, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An oral history of the attacks against the students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights Books, 2017)
I Couldn’t Even Imagine provides a patchwork history of 26 September through a collage of minimally interrupted statements (reminiscent of another foundational work of Mexican journalism, Elena Poniatowska’s own choral account of the 1968 student massacre, La noche de Tlatelolco). Using interviews with hundreds of witnesses and survivors, Gibler recounts not only the attacks on the scene but also the students’ interactions with civilians and hospital staff as they sought help and refuge, as well as the experiences of non-normalistas who were also attacked that night. While most of the book is focused on 26 September, based on on-the-scene research in the early days of October 2014, its later pages are devoted to the accounts of parents of receiving the news that their sons were dead or missing, interspersed with quotes from press conferences, the GIEI researchers, municipal employees, and the students, alongside a timeline of the early responses to the tragedy in the Afterword.
These early interviews were a crucial source in the Forensic Architecture reconstruction of the events.
I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us is available in English and in Spanish, and is currently open access via the Internet Archive (in English) or the Forensic Architecture Ayotzinapa platform (in Spanish).
8. Grieta Negra, Gráfica contra el olvido: 54 artistas mexicanos que se indignan y gritan (2016)
News of the Ayotzinapa case quickly sparked fierce and prolonged outcry, drawing renewed attention to the prevalence of impunity and narco and state violence in the country. Disappearances had been a tool to silence opponents of the state during the 1960s and 1970s, and have risen again since the beginning of the so-called War on Drugs (2006-), but this legacy had largely not been reckoned with on a mass scale, nor had disappearances been met with the level of popular mobilization Ayotzinapa inspired. In a country where more than 100,000 people have been officially recognized as having been disappeared, the visibility of the Ayotzinapa case has brought greater attention to these atrocities and shone a harsh light on state institutions.
Capturing just some of this spirit of mass solidarity, this book, the result of a project coordinated by Grieta Negra workshop and Escuela de Cultura Popular Mártires del 68, gathers together linocut and screen prints by 54 artists from various states, featuring phrases like ‘43 SOMOS TODOS’, ‘Sin verdad no hay justicia’, ‘Son 43 (y miles más)’, and ‘La esperanza está en la educación’. It is a testament to the ability to preserve memory through art in the face of silence and impunity, and the assumption by many of the pain of Ayotzinapa as their own.
The book is available in Spanish, though physical copies are currently sold out. The ebook has been made available by a participating Grieta Negra workshop artist, and can be found here.
9. Andalusia K Soloff, Taken Alive: Looking for Ayotzinapa’s 43 (Penguin Random House, 2019), illustrated by Marco Parra and Anahí H Galaviz
Taken Alive is a graphic novelization of the Ayotzinapa disappearances and protests. Though journalist Andalusia Knoll Soloff reported on the Ayotzinapa case in 2014 for international outlets in print form, she decided to compile this information and experiences into a graphic novel, together with artists Marco Parra and Anahí H Galaviz. As she told Gatopardo on her decision to opt for this form:
el cómic tiene la capacidad de llegar a un audience a la que no llegan los libros de texto, o incluso los documentaries. Las imágenes lo hacen todo más ligero y permiten contar histories de una manera más íntima”.
the comic has the ability to reach an audience print books cannot reach, nor even documentaries. Images can make everything lighter and can allow us to tell stories in a more intimate way.
The book depicts the survivors and families during the first several months of their mobilizing in particular, following them on their ‘caravan’ around Mexico. It also looks back to the history of state violence in Guerrero, and of violence against the Ayotzinapa normalistas in the years before the mass disappearance.
Taken Alive is available in Spanish, French, Norwegian and in an abridged booklet form in English.
10. Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle, ‘After Ayotzinapa’ Podcast, Reveal News (2022)
‘After Ayotzinapa’ is a three-episode podcast series by Reveal News’s Anayansi Díaz-Cortes and the National Security Archive’s Kate Doyle, diving into investigations and cover-ups from 2014-22, new evidence obtained through the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and the arrests and indictments of members of the military in the last few years. It was recently awarded an IRE Award, in no small part due to its absorbing storytelling, range of recordings of critical sources, and access to recently declassified data.
The podcast is available at Reveal News, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.
A Spanish version of the podcast is also available with the support of Adonde Media.
Further documents, images, and videos related to the case are available at the NS Archive’s Mexico Project site.
References
| ↑1 | Though often not included in tallies of victims of the event, three further non-normalistas were killed by police in their brutal, frenzied attack, and about 40 others injured. |
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