The Missing Ayotzinapa 43 and the Militarization of the Public Sphere in Mexico
"Plantón por los 43 de Ayotzinapa en Paseo de la Reforma" by Luis Alvaz, uploaded on October 29, 2023. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC) BY-SA 4.0. No changes were made

The Missing Ayotzinapa 43 and the Militarization of the Public Sphere in Mexico

On the night of September 26, 2014, Mexican municipal police intercepted and opened fire on two buses carrying roughly one hundred students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College. By the following morning, six people were dead, and 43 others were missing. The military and government maintain that the police passed the students on to an organised crime group, who killed them at a nearby waste facility. Indeed, the government has proposed various explanations for the attack, ranging from inter-cartel conflict to the presence of drugs on the bus. In the ten years since the mass kidnapping, the families of the missing Ayotzinapa 43 have held rallies and protests, demanding accountability from the government and the Mexican military, as well as answers regarding the whereabouts of their loved ones. A ‘disappeared’ person is different from a missing person or victim of kidnapping. The UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances defines an enforced disappearance as an abduction with “the support of acquiescence of the state,” followed by a refusal to acknowledge the disappearance, identify responsible parties, or locate the individual. In such cases where the person is killed, it often entails the destruction of remains so they cannot be found or identified. The case has become emblematic of the broader epidemic of missing and disappeared people in Mexico. 

In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared a “War on Drugs” to combat drug cartels and law enforcement corruption. Military powers were expanded, and soldiers took on social services responsibilities such as police, criminal investigators and prosecutors. Between 2006 and 2021, 246 government functions previously managed by civilian authorities were transferred to the Mexican Armed Forces – in health, education, and public works departments. According to leaked government documents, during Calderon’s six-year term, over 40,000 people were reported missing, a rate eighteen times higher than the previous four decades. From 2012 to 2018, 100,000 individuals were registered as missing under President Nieto. 

Under Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) government, from 2018 to 2024, 50,000 more disappeared. The majority of victims in Mexico’s epidemic are men between the ages of 15-40. However, between 2017 and 2023, the number of disappeared women and girls tripled, with an average of three girls and women going missing per day in the central state of Guanajuato. This indicates an increase in gender-based violence in the past decade, with men remaining the largest group affected by the epidemic of state-sanctioned violence.

Thus, the Mexican state has systematically failed through multiple administrations to effectively address, acknowledge or combat the epidemic. In 2014, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) was established to investigate the Ayotzinapa case alongside Mexican authorities. They found serious lapses in the government’s investigation: crime scenes had been left unscrutinized, bodies were not photographed in colour, time of rigour mortis was not established, and no blood, hair or thread samples had been taken from the scene. Key witnesses, including two of the bus drivers, were not interviewed. The authorities wiped security cameras near and around the scene before footage could be retrieved. The Mexican authority’s lack of diligence in collecting evidence raised several red flags regarding the legitimacy of Mexican legal authority.

Officially, the Mexican Federal Attorney General (Procuraduría General de la República, PGR) maintains that the municipal police handed the Ayotzinapa 43 over to an organised crime group. They claim that the group transported the students to a local waste facility, where they were killed before being incinerated and dumped in a nearby river. GIEI findings refute this explanation. This indicates there was no fire at the waste dump on the date reported by the PGR. In the absence of any remains beyond a single bone fragment reportedly found downriver, the PGR’s conclusions are biased and premature, raising major questions concerning the true whereabouts of the missing 43. The government has not fully explained their findings, and the failure to investigate is not an isolated incident. 

The militarization of the public sphere as a security strategy is under international and domestic scrutiny due to the Mexican Armed Forces’ increasing lack of transparency over the last two decades. The Mexican Secretariat of Security and Civilian Protection (SPCC) found that in 2022, the National Guard made 6040 arrests. However, the National Guard reported only 3,007 detainees in their 2022 report. When asked by the human rights group Washington Office on Latin America, the Guard provided information on just over 1000 arrests. The staggering discrepancy between the actual number of detainees and the official statistics illustrates how the military obscures information, giving civil society no trail to follow. Those 3033 people came in contact with the military, but what happened to them next was unknown and unrecorded. 

In 2017, AMLO campaigned on an explicit promise to the families of the Ayotzinapa 43 that he would find those responsible and report the truth. His first act as President was to establish a Truth and Commission Group, an indicator of hope that, finally, the government would properly address its role in the case and the wider epidemic of enforced disappearances. In 2021, progress was made. Investigators found that the army had destroyed and moved evidence, intimidated witnesses, and been in contact with the crime group allegedly responsible for the killings. Not only was the army implicated, but state institutions such as the judicial system were as well. As this occurred, AMLO’s government accused prosecutors of inflating the number of military personnel implicated in the case and halted the investigation. Working groups on the case, such as the GIEI, resigned due to Army interference in the case, and all independent prosecutors and investigators were removed. Rather than admit the consequences of its militarization policy, AMLO’s government retreated. 

Civil society groups have thus been the strongest advocates for the disappeared and their families. To mark the 10th anniversary, the Committee for the Mothers and Fathers of the Ayotzinapa 43 led a seven-day series of protests titled “10 Years of Impunity.” Thousands marched through Mexico City, demanding answers from the government. During the protest, César Manuel González Hernández, a father of one of the disappeared, directly addressed AMLO’s administration: “You put yourself at the feet of the army that you’re so proud of…. You turned your back on all of us fathers and mothers whose children were disappeared by the state.” Pressure from the parents of the Ayotzinapa 43 comes at a consequential time as Mexico ushers in AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. Her approach to the Ayotzinapa case, Mexico’s legacy of militarization policy, and the wider epidemic of enforced disappearances remains to be seen. Regardless, the government cannot stop the families of the disappeared from pursuing answers to what truly happened to the 43 students on September 26, 2014.

Edited by Campbell Graham

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