IGUALA,
Mexico — STUDENT protesters in rural Mexico have long dealt with
heavy-handed police officers. But on the black night of Sept. 26,
students who attended a rural teachers’ college realized they were
facing a far worse menace in this southern city. Not only were police
officers shooting haphazardly at them, killing three students and
several passers-by; shady gunmen were also firing from the sidelines.
The
next morning, the corpse of a student was dumped on a major street.
He’d had his skin peeled off and his eyes gouged out. It was the mark of
drug cartel assassins.
Soldiers
and federal detectives detained two alleged cartel hit men, who
confessed they had conspired with the police to murder students. They
led troops to pits on the outskirts of Iguala containing 28 charred
corpses. Forensic teams are working to identify the bodies. A total of
43 students went missing that night, many last seen being bundled into
police cars.
When
I went to the grave site on an eerie hill, it still stank of decaying
human flesh. I had just been interviewing some of the students’
classmates at their university, mostly teenage sons of poor farmers, who
are idealistic, committed and frightened. I have covered cartel
violence in Mexico for over a decade. But as I inhaled the stench of
death on that hill, and saw photos of the mutilated student on the road,
I felt as never before that I was covering an act of pure unadulterated
evil.
Why
drug cartels want to slaughter students may at first seem inexplicable.
But it is a symptom of a systematic process that has been taking place
in Mexico for years. Drug cartels are taking over chunks of government
apparatus, from local police forces to city and state governments.
Sometimes, they control the officials; other times, cartel members
themselves are the officials. I call it state capture. A student I
talked to had a more visceral term for it: narco-politica, or
narco-politics.
It’s
a terrifying concept. Being ruled by corrupt and self-interested
politicians can be bad. But imagine being ruled by sociopathic
gangsters. They respond to rowdy students in the only way they
understand: with extreme violence designed to cause terror. They stick
the mutilated body of a student on public display in the same way they
do rival traffickers.
The
market city lies amid hills of marijuana and opium fields and is the
fief of a brutal cell of traffickers who call themselves Guerreros
Unidos, or Warriors United. After the discovery of the massacre of the
students, federal soldiers took control of the city. Twenty-two police
officers were detained for working with the cartel. In a brazen move,
the Warriors put up banners calling for the release of the officers.
The
Iguala police chief is now on the run with an arrest warrant behind
him. The Iguala mayor has also fled town as the state moves to impeach
him. An intelligence agency report linked him to the Warriors, the
Mexican media revealed. His wife has also come into the spotlight. One
of her brothers served prison time for trafficking and two others were
killed in a gangland shooting, according to the intelligence report. Who
knows how high this trail of corruption may lead?
The
Iguala mayor was a member of the opposition Democratic Revolution
Party. But the international attention to this atrocity is also an
embarrassment for President Enrique Peña Nieto. Since taking power in
2012, he has been laboring to change Mexico’s violent image, focusing on
reforms such as opening up the nation’s energy sector to foreign
companies. He has also taken down major drug traffickers, such as
Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, and Nazario Moreno González,
also known as El Más Loco. Some observers say Mr. Peña Nieto’s reforms
have made this “Mexico’s moment.” But can it really be Mexico’s moment
with such barbaric crimes against young people taking place? The
president may be reforming Mexico’s laws, but this case highlights the
deep problems in the institutions needed to uphold those laws.
The
students in Iguala had themselves protested against Mr. Peña Nieto’s
reforms, as they are opposed to an education law that will evaluate
teachers. Most come from poor indigenous communities where many don’t
even speak Spanish, and they object to being tested, and someday
possibly being fired, for not knowing enough English.
The
rural teachers’ university the students attend is a longtime center of
radicalism, covered in pictures of Che Guevara and Lenin. Their protests
can be noisy and anger residents as they blockade roads, holding up
traffic, and vandalize buildings. To travel to their marches, they often
commandeer commercial buses. They normally return them and the practice
is largely tolerated, but the bus companies complain about the
disruption of their operations.
About
120 of these students had come to Iguala from their nearby university
on Sept. 26 and took three buses from the city station. They were
driving the buses out of town when the police officers and cartel gunmen
opened fire on them. Some students say they threw stones back, but none
of them were armed when the killing spree began.
The
events that led to such a violent response are still blurry. There are
reports that city officials were particularly angry about students
disturbing a public event. The large group of boisterous students could
be seen by cartel operatives as invading their turf. But whatever the
exact mechanics, the frightening specter is of a city controlled by
gangsters responding to public disorder with mass murder.
The
students wanted the buses to travel to an annual demonstration on Oct. 2
in Mexico City. That day commemorates the massacre by soldiers of
dozens — or possibly hundreds — of students in the capital’s square of
Tlatelolco in the lead-up to the 1968 Olympics. The students in Iguala
never made it to mourn the dead of half a century ago. Now Sept. 26
marks a new date of atrocities on Mexico’s calendar.
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