Will Mexico’s Disappeared Ever Be Found?
27th September 2024
On Friday 26 September 2014, a group of Mexican students boarded buses in the town of Iguala. Members of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, in the southern state of Guerrero, they were hoping to reach Mexico City for an event marking the anniversary of the infamous Tlatelolco massacre. On that day in 1968, hundreds of students were gunned down by the security forces, while others were tortured and falsely imprisoned. Some were simply disappeared, and never seen again. The outrage itself would soon be followed by a monumental cover-up, and ultimately become the defining event of recent Mexican history.
Little did the Ayotzinapa students know that history was about to repeat itself. As night fell, their buses were stopped by police barricades. There, on a lonely stretch of highway, they were set upon by officers and members of the local drug cartel. Many of the students were shot, a number were hospitalised, and one was found dead by the roadside, a part of his face ripped away. It was only the following morning, however, that the full scale of the horror became clear: 43 students couldn’t be accounted for. A decade on from their disappearance, they’re presumed dead. Their bodies have never been recovered.
If the Tlatelolco massacre became the defining moment of Mexico’s authoritarian past, “the 43” have come to symbolise the country’s stumbling democratic transition. There are, after all, over 110,000 desaparecidos (“disappeared ones”) right across Mexico, anonymous men and women who vanished one day and never came home. You’re reminded of them everywhere you go, their faces peering out at you from countless monochrome posters. Each, of course, represents a private tragedy. But just like Tlatelolco, the case of the Ayotzinapa students has gained vigour through the years, and ten years on represents abuse of state power at its most absolute.
A poignant reminder that Mexico is a failed state.