On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  That was in 2002, but closing the main road from Acapulco to Mexico City was a standard form of protest—nonviolent but disruptive. Just five months before my dinner with Juan, teachers in Guerrero occupied two tollbooths on the Autopista del Sol, allowing motorists to drive through only after handing them pamphlets explaining the reasons behind their strike. They also demanded the handover—alive—of the forty-three missing students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college.

  “Students are used to closing highways as part of their protests—or commandeering buses. It’s an accepted tactic.”

  The students have no money, no vehicles, no access to the power structure. I said, “It’s class warfare.”

  “Yes.”

  As we talked, we continued to eat, and I was writing down Juan’s words in my notebook—ideal, really, because I could ask him to repeat certain statements, or spell names, or clarify his assertions. And this was a small, quiet restaurant, where we sat without interruption. We were now served a chocolate dessert, and somehow this delicacy made me self-conscious about our peaceful surroundings and the bitter conflict he was describing—typical Mexican incongruity.

  I said, “What about the forty-three students?”

  “I was coming to that. You need to know the background—the plight of the rural schools. The attitude of the government—suspicion and oppression.” He sat back in his chair and said simply, “The situation was structurally damaged from the beginning.”

  He reminded me of another massacre, the killing in 1968 of four hundred or more students by Mexican army sharpshooters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. And how, after 1968, the government was suspicious and disapproving of any gatherings of youths. Concerts were banned. Rock music was forbidden to be played on the national radio station, and these sanctions had lasted about ten years, at which time Juan himself started a radio program, featuring Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie. But no one forgot the horror of the 1968 massacre.

  “So, in September 2014, the students in Ayotzinapa were preparing an event to commemorate that massacre. They needed money to go to the capital of Guerrero state, but having none, they took five buses.”

  “Commandeered the buses?”

  “Yes, as I said, this was a normal tactic. Just using buses at random. It was not a problem at first. A large group of students went to the town of Iguala for the buses. They were escorted by the local police, the Federales, and the army. Then the commander in chief of the armed forces, who was in charge of the whole action, said the buses had to stop. The mayor was in touch with all the forces the whole time. Why did the buses stop at that precise moment?”

  “Quién sabe?”

  “The mayor’s order. Because of one particular bus, which was equipped to smuggle drugs to the US—very sophisticated concealments and compartments. A similar bus was stopped in Chicago some years ago, a normal-looking bus but full of drugs inside the walls.”

  “This mayor was part of the plot?”

  “José Luis Abarca, a known and proven drug lord—he’s in jail now. His wife was also an accomplice. He had killed people. He’s a criminal. This is an established fact.”

  “And the students?”

  “Abducted,” Juan said. “Disappeared. Obviously killed. International experts came and unearthed most of the story. But when they asked if they could interview members of the army, permission was not granted. So a great deal of the story is untold. But because the bus had drugs on it, they recovered it and killed and cremated the students who were on it, after kidnapping them.”

  “What was the point of killing them?”

  “If they were aware of the drugs in the bus, and the collusion of the police and the drug lords, they were witnesses who had to be dealt with. This is such a violent country, they wouldn’t think twice about killing forty-three students.”

  “After all this time no one has gotten to the bottom of it?”

  “It is known that the students were killed. But where are the bodies? Only two have been found. The government has done everything possible to obstruct justice.”

  “But why?”

  “They are counting on people to forget.”

  But in a poor country, people value what little they have: their dignity, their lives, their children most of all—and their long memories. Their memories are merciless.

  They remembered everything—the students who survived, the teachers, the grieving parents, the bystanders, the bus drivers. And when the American journalist John Gibler (Mexico Unconquered, To Die in Mexico) traveled to Iguala and Ayotzinapa to seek these people out, and over a two-year period listened to their stories, he heard things that surprised even Juan Villoro. His account of these revelations appeared a few months after my dinner with Juan. I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, Gibler’s book, contains the testimonies of scores of people who witnessed the massacre or suffered in the aftermath of the mass kidnapping.

  As Juan had said, the students from—to give it its full name—the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa had hoped to find some buses to take them to an event in Mexico City, a demonstration and memorial service to commemorate the massacre in 1968 by the Mexican police and military (and hidden snipers) at Tlatelolco. This action was ordered by the Mexican president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who later denied that a massacre had taken place, calling it a confrontation. The anniversary was October 2. The Ayotzinapa students set out on September 25 to commandeer the buses in Iguala. They were attacked the next day, six murdered in skirmishes on the highway in Iguala, one left in a coma with a bullet to the head, and forty-three Ayotzinapa students, most of them nineteen or twenty, one of them seventeen, abducted, “forcibly disappeared,” a monumental levantón in which none of the levantados were heard of again.

  The only trace found of the forty-three students was a single bone fragment, which was later proven to have been planted by the police to back up a concocted story. The detail that Juan had heard, about the one bus possibly containing heroin to be smuggled north, was mentioned to Gibler by various informants. But there were five buses, and all of them were attacked.

  What emerges from the eyewitnesses to the armed assault on the buses is the shock of the students, which is reflected in the title of the book. They knew there might be a hassle or an argument, but they had not imagined that the police would shoot to kill. Taking buses to attend a demo was an accepted practice—many bus drivers colluded with the students and used the hijacking of their buses as an excuse to spend a few restful days off.

  In testimony after testimony, the students described to Gibler the buses setting off and, within minutes, the horror of being ambushed by the municipal police, the windows shattering, bullets flying, students being hit—many were wounded—the sight of blood and shattered bones. And then the police boarding the buses, screaming insults, demanding names, threatening the students, and dragging them away. The chain of voices in the book is consistent, one account backing up another, and adding detail. But all of it comes from the students’ point of view, and the effect is chaotic—fearful, frustrating, a hellish bewilderment, as the assault continues into the night, the students refusing to leave their fallen comrades, seeking help.

  But no one helped. Forty students were wounded, many of them seriously with gunshot wounds. Even when their fellow students managed to take the injured to various hospitals—bleeding, some in grave condition—they were met with indifference from nurses and contempt from doctors. One doctor who refused to attend to the wounded students, interviewed by Gibler, dismissed the whole business and denigrated the students as agitators. “That school is worthless,” the medical man told Gibler. And the students, the ayotzinapos, “they are criminals.” Their protests are disruptive—“dirty, ugly”—they deserve what they got. A bullet-riddled corpse of one student found on the street had its face flayed and its eyes gouged out. The limbs of others had been severed.

  “So, cutting off th
eir faces, taking out their eyes, cutting off their limbs, and incinerating their bodies,” Gibler asks the doctor, “that seems right to you?”

  “Yes,” the doctor replies. “Truthfully, yes.”

  Sorting the evidence, examining the accounts, Gibler proved that the government explanation for the killings and abduction was false and self-serving—untrue that a cartel masterminded it, that students were mistaken for a rival drug gang, that after the kidnapping the forty-three students were shot, their bodies incinerated at the local trash dump, and their ashes put in bags and tossed into the Iguala River.

  “An overwhelming amount of evidence describes a very different reality,” Gibler writes. “On September 26–27, 2014, scores of Iguala, Cocula, and Huitzuco police collaborated with Guerrero state police and federal police to carry out hours of horrific violence against unarmed college students, while the Mexican army watched from the shadows.”

  About those police: they are not the protectors they seem. Gibler was assured by various people in the know in Iguala—among them a journalist and a city councilwoman—that there is no separation between the police and the narcos. Almost the entire police force is comprised of narcos in police uniforms, using police weapons and squad cars. They are known as los bélicos (the belligerents), and it was they who carried out the assault on the students.

  “In Mexico, police and military at every level have fully merged with forces of organized crime,” Gibler concludes. “It is no longer accurate to speak about corruption—if it ever was.”

  But why did the attack happen? Why the deaths? Why were the forty-three students kidnapped, and why have they never been found? These questions are not answered in Gibler’s book, nor can answers to them be found in any other book, nor in any official report, nor by the students’ parents or any informants.

  What is clear is that the prevailing tone of the attackers is vindictiveness—against protesting students, their leftist views, their civil disruption, and their actions resulting in social dislocation. The resentful attitude of the doctors and nurses who were so little help to the wounded reflects this bitterness. The students—poor, despised, studying at a small rural college known for its radical views—were hated for their taking buses, hated for their ideas, hated for their sense of grievance and political activism.

  One theory finds the mayor and his wife behind it all. As Villoro said, the mayor, José Luis Abarca, was also a drug lord. His wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, was ambitious politically (as well as related to members of a powerful local cartel), and on the night of the killings and kidnappings, she was hosting a celebrity event in Iguala, speaking to dignitaries, and (perhaps) ordered the police action so her speech would not be disrupted. She disappeared with her husband after the night of mayhem, but the couple was eventually found, arrested, and jailed, though not convicted of any crime. To this day, the Mexican government has not charged anyone with the abduction and disappearance of the forty-three students. The pain of this injustice has been traumatic.

  “Something about the events in Iguala—the combination of horror, state culpability, and well-crafted official incompetence—struck at the very core of a people exhausted by violence and government depravity,” Gibler writes of the aftermath. “Anger was everywhere palpable.”

  The anger has not subsided, the protests continue, and the grieving parents (“victims of our own government,” one mother says, “because we are campesinos”) go on seeking answers and have refused any money as compensation: “Our children are not for sale.”

  Wishing to know more, I wrote to John Gibler and asked him about the Mexican government’s involvement in the massacre.

  “There is an overwhelming amount of documented information as to federal involvement in the attacks,” Gibler wrote me. “But also, and this is a key point for me and something I try to emphasize in the afterword [of the book]: I consider the federal government’s ‘cover-up’ to be a part of the attacks themselves. Since 43 students were and continue to be disappeared, the violence is not only contained or concentrated in the past (as with the murders and injuries) on the night of the initial physical aggression. The violence, material as well as emotional, against the students and their families is maintained and extended into the present by the act of forced disappearance.

  “The administration of that disappearance—the lies and torture and omissions carried out by the federal government in its cover-up—is itself constitutive of the atrocity.”

  He went on to say that the federal government, having connived in the cover-up, cooked up evidence, destroyed the evidence of eyewitnesses, and tortured people to force them to lie. Though all of this crookedness had been documented by independent investigators, the government continued to falsify its part in the massacre.

  “There is no doubt that the federal government participated in the attacks,” Gibler went on. “And there is no doubt that the federal government coordinated a massive and grotesque cover-up. What we still do not know is why. You ask: What motivated the attacks? The GIEI [the Group of Interdisciplinary Independent Experts, impartial lawyers and human rights advocates] poses the hypothesis that the students may have unknowingly commandeered a commercial bus loaded with a major heroin shipment.

  “That is a logical hypothesis that could explain the chaotic and escalating nature of the attacks. If it were to be proven it would show that, indeed, the police and army control and administer the drug trade. However, I think that independent of the motivation that sparked the attacks, the precise nature of the brutality—the combination of killing, mutilation, and mass forced disappearance—was targeted directly at the students for being radical, organized, poor; rural and indigenous students of a school noted for its anti-government organizing and historic links to insurrectionary armed movements.”

  Ayotzinapa is tragic but instructive, and every aspect of it explains the mood of Mexico, from the poor, to the middle-class doctor or dentist who sees students as complainers, to a government that feels no obligation to be fair. People in power—police, politicians—believe they can get away with murder. Above all, Ayotzinapa reveals the penetration of the cartels in all Mexican institutions.

  This is also why an authority figure who demonizes Mexicans and stereotypes them with insults—such as the American president—or who belittles the poor and subjects them to arbitrary arrest, is a familiar tyrant, inspiring cynicism. Mexicans spend very little time railing against the US government, because in their experience, government by its very nature is corrupt, often criminal, and the poor are its victims.

  El Taller, the Workshop

  Without warning, an invitation was circulated by the Mexican writer Guillermo Osorno to a number of Mexican novelists, editors, journalists, and broadcasters, asking whether they would be interested in taking part in a taller (“tuh-yair”), a workshop, for ten days at the Centro Horizontal, a cultural center on Colima Street in the Roma Norte district of the capital. Greater Mexico City had been particularly hard hit by the recent Puebla earthquake—there were areas of fallen houses, closed-off streets, yellow warning tape, and avenues piled with the rubble of collapsed walls. And much later someone said to me that because of the trauma of the event, many citizens yearned to be part of a sympathetic group, to talk, to write, to share stories, to ease the pain wrought by the earthquake.

  The recipients of the invitation were asked to submit a piece of their writing. If it was deemed suitable—intelligent, original, well written—a place would be reserved for its creator, and tuition was free.

  Nor was the teacher to be paid. But it was suggested that the teacher—a gringo writer—might wish to improve his Spanish. And though the classes, mainly conducted in English, would be held from ten to noon each day, any students who were inclined might have lunch together with the teacher—more literary discussion—or go on field trips to sights in the city in the afternoon. A further detail: this gringo writer was self-supporting and had no connection to the American embassy or any for
eign organization.

  I was the gringo writer. Juan Villoro and Centro Horizontal’s director, Guillermo Osorno, examined the entries and chose twenty-four students. They were young and middle-aged, a few oldish, men and women, all of them accomplished, most from Mexico City but others from the nearer cities of Querétaro and Cuernavaca, or more distant places, Oaxaca and Durango. One was American but a longtime Mexico resident, another had dual Mexican-US citizenship. They were bright, funny, insightful, generous, and friendly, glad to be included in the ten days of talk and writing, and most of them spoke English well.

  They were candid, too, and all but one—Adán Ramírez Serret, an impish, genial fellow but a tenacious and resourceful journalist—had been to the United States. Valerie Miranda, the dual citizen, worked for an important internet site, dividing her time between its offices in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Valerie was a stylish, dark-haired woman of Mexican and Scandinavian ancestry, taller than the average Mexican, and could have passed for English, French, or American, an ambiguity that was at the heart of the story she told on the first day of the class.

  “My husband and I were in Utopia, Texas—please take note of the name—with my husband’s friend,” Valerie said, standing and commanding the attention of the room. “We decided to get a cup of coffee, and he was talking with his friend on the sidewalk, so I said that I would get the coffee. One thing I should say—my husband and his friend look very Mexican. I know I don’t look Mexican in a conventional way. There was a line inside the coffee shop, but I didn’t mind waiting. Pretty soon I heard a man behind me say, ‘There’s a couple of Mexicans outside. Let’s go fuck them up.’ I slipped out and told them we had to leave at once.”

  In the shocked silence that followed, Diego Olavarría signaled with his hand. He was a slender, bearded fellow, his head often cocked to one side in a scrutinizing way, who described himself as a cronista, a chronicler, an occupation to which I could relate.