Credit: Forensic Architecture.
The third anniversary of the the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa Rural
Teachers' College students (known as
normalistas) in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico has come and has brought new
developments with it.
Forensic Architecture, a London-based agency that conducts research on
behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organizations, and political
and environmental justice groups, has reconstructed the events of September 26 and
27, 2014, which is presented as a forensic tool for parents, investigators and
the general public to further the investigation. The interactive platform depicts
a vivid account showing federal and state police agents in the vicinity at the
moment when 43 students disappeared from Iguala.
FA pieces together the events of 26 September 2014, when about 100 normalistas were attacked in the town of
Iguala, Guerrero, by local police in collusion with criminal organizations.
Numerous other branches of the Mexican security apparatus either participated
in or witnessed the events, including state and federal police and the
military. Five people, including two students and a minor, were killed when the
officers opened fire on the buses, and another student was later found dead,
his body showing signs of horrific torture. Forty other were wounded, and 43
students simply vanished.
FA’s main sources of evidence are the reports produced by the Interdisciplinary
Group of Independent Experts (GIEI, by its initials in Spanish)
– which was created in November 2014 through an agreement between the Inter
American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), the Mexican State, and representatives
of the disappeared students in Ayotzinapa – whose findings point to several
wholes in the official investigations and raises several questions, all of
which the government has chosen to ignore.
GIEI found that there were nine separate attack between that Friday and
Saturday in different places. This shows the scope and magnitude of operation
that simply doesn’t match the authorities’ narrative. Also, the involvement of
different police departments, including municipal, civil, and federal shows a
level of coordination that suggest involvement at the central, or federal,
level. Details remain very confusing, but the reconstruction of events
shed new light on what happened that night.
Forensic Architecture
reconstruction
Photo: Isabel Sanginés/SomosDelMedio.Org (Flickr). Algunos derechos reservados.
FA highlights five major shortcomings in the official
investigations. First, the version of events the Office of the General Prosecutor presented in court fails
to meet the evidence. This version confuses places, suppresses relevant scenes
and events, confuses the times, and presents events that are physical
impossible to have happened the way prosecutors described, just to name a few.
The Office continues to defend this version of events, last present before a
judge in December 2014, to this day. This version of events is so unsustainable
that Forensic Architecture argues that “many of the defendants will easily be
able to reverse the accusations eventually”, meaning that “the negligence in
the investigation may cause that the Ayotzinapa case goes unpunished”,
according to its report. The agency also found that the Office obtained
confessions and declaration through “questionable methods”, such as coercion, which
not only violates human rights, but also prevents the truth from surfacing.
Second, the Office of
the General Prosecutor failed to properly interrogate the Military
Intelligence Agent who reported to the commander of the Mexican
Army’s 27th Battalion based in Iguala and witnessed the main attack against
the students for almost an hour, even taking videos and photos. The evidence
reconstructed by FA shows that the agent was at the exact place and time as the
“fifth bus”. The final GIEI report found that the hundred or so students were
traveling in a convoy of five buses, though the “fifth bus” inexplicably disappeared
from the official case files at some point during the investigation. FA also found
that the Military Intelligence Agent ran from the Iguala Municipal police,
leaving a civilian motorcycle behind. The report contends the Mexican Army then
went back to the scene to retrieve the motorcycle used irregularly by the Agent
and not to look for the missing students.
Third, the FA report sustains that,
similarly to the Military Intelligence Agent and Federal Police officers, the
regional coordinator of the Guerrero’s Ministerial Police was also present at
the time the students went missing. This piece of information is relevant given
the alleged Ministerial Police’s role in the violent persecution of the
surviving victims of the attacks. Additionally, the Ministerial Police’s has
been publicly accused of having ties to organized criminal organizations, as
well as the Iguala Police, claims that have not been adequately investigated.
Fourth, the FA was able to
reconstruct the visual field, which shows a witness never identified by the Office
of the General Prosecutor. Also, neither the Office of the General
Prosecutor nor the Office of Guerrero’s Prosecutor timely requested the
surveillance footage from security cameras installed on the courthouse’s
exterior walls, which could have included valuable evidence. Later, the Supreme
Court of Justice destroyed this footage.
Lastly, Forensic Architecture
points out that the need to clear up what happened at “Crucero de Santa
Teresa”, where a sixth bus carrying soccer players from a Chilpancingo team,
which had nothing to do with the Ayotzinapa Normal School, also came under
deadly attack that night as it tried to leave Iguala. Even though this attack
is unrelated to the normalistas, understanding
what happened there is key to understanding why local police were stopping
buses in Iguala. The events around this sixth bus could hold valuable
information regarding the motives and the underlying cause behind the attacks.
But why?
Gente unida por los 43 estudiantes desaparecidos. Foto: Semoan80, CC BY-SA 4.0.
A government investigation soon concluded that the police – in the pay of
a local drug gang called Guerreros Unidos – mistook the students for members a
rival drug gang known as Los Rojos. But Mexicans were – justly – skeptical of
this finding. Mexico’s former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Káram determined
that the 43 normalistas were taken to
a dumping ground in Cocula to be burned and that their ashes were later thrown
to a river. Human rights, legal, and medical experts have consistently
questioned these conclusions, and, thus the case remains open.
Additionally, the government claimed the students had gone into Iguala to
boycott a political speech by the mayor’s wife. But evidence shows the students
had not even intended to go there. They had
originally intended to commandeer more buses in the state’s capital city, Chilpancingo,
but decided to detour when they found federal police patrol cars near the toll
booths where they were to intercept the buses. These makes both government’s
theories – that the students had political motives and/or relation to a drug
gang that had come to challenge the dominant local gang, Guerreros Unidos –
unsustainable.
One hypothesis regarding the motive behind
the attack gained momentum about a year after the events and argued that the
police were not after the students, but their bus. Speculations center on the
idea that the bus was carrying shipment of drugs and/or money, which corrupt
officers were trying to recover. This hypothesis suggests that the students
were at the wrong place at the wrong time and that authorities, upon realizing
their mistake, covered up the facts and tried to pawn it off as a gang-related
operation gone awry.
The truth is, we may never get to the bottom of what happened and, like
FA predicts, perpetrators may go unpunished. But none of this means that Ayotzinapa
will stop fighting for their own. Less than two weeks ago, 60 students seized a
bus to demand truth and justice for
the 43 missing students. Local police opened fire at the bus and arrested 12
students, reflecting an attitude all to familiar to the residents of the small
rural town.