A protestor is pictured outside of the National Palace in Mexico City on the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students, September 26, 2023. Photograph courtesy Héctor
10th Anniversary Brings No Closure to Families of Victims
The National Crisis of Forced Disappearance in Mexico Continues
Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up.
The violent attacks of that night and the repeated obstruction of efforts to obtain justice are together emblematic of the human rights crisis in Mexico. The disappearances remain an open wound for the victims’ families and the country as a whole, where more than 100,000 people have vanished without a trace. Sadly, President López Obrador will complete his presidential term without having provided closure for the families of the Aytozinapa students—one of his key campaign promises.
The two-day conference at UCL brought together key investigators, analysts, and academics involved in the case. In her address, Doyle said it was the “anniversary of impunity,” explaining how the Ayotzinapa case illustrates the phenomenon of macro-criminality, where security forces, organized crime and economic elites “collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive.” Related to this, Doyle argued, is a system of macro-impunity, where these same actors “cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function.”
Since 2015, the National Security Archive has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for U.S. documents related to the case of the 43 students, the “war on drugs” and its consequences, and U.S. security assistance to Mexico. In 2020, Kate Doyle and the National Security Archive partnered with reporter Anayansi Díaz-Cortes and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting to develop the podcast series “After Ayotzinapa,” released in January 2022. Two months later, the Spanish-language version, “Después de Ayotzinapa,” was released in co-production with Adonde Media. The National Security Archive continues to investigate the case with our partners at Centro Prodh and Reveal. Visit our Ayotzinapa Investigations page to learn more about the case and the National Security Archive’s investigative and advocacy work.
One decade ago, Ernesto Guerrero, 23 years old, one of the students at the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college who survived September 26, 2014, described the aftermath of the first sustained attacks by police on three buses stuck at Calle Juan N. Álvarez in Iguala. The intense gunfire had finally stopped, and the police cars were gone. One student lay sprawled in the middle of the street with a critical head wound. Another had several fingers shot off, a third was shot in the face. A group of some twenty students had been forced off the buses and taken away in the backs of police trucks.
Journalist John Gibler later published Ernesto’s testimony in his book, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, a collection of oral histories about the night of Iguala. Ernesto told John, “We students tried to cordon off the area and protect it as best we could. We put rocks and sticks around the bullet shells and other evidence so that no one would pick them up or step on them, so when the detectives arrived… But they never came.”
The Mexican government’s first response to the disappearance of the 43 was to construct a cover-up. President Enrique Peña Nieto and his senior officials maintained the validity of their “historical truth” until the day they left power.
On December 1, 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office with the very public pledge to solve Ayotzinapa. López Obrador decreed the creation of a truth commission to be headed by his most senior human rights official, Alejandro Encinas. A human rights lawyer with the United Nations, Omar Gómez Trejo, was named special prosecutor. The president went further, ordering all federal agencies (including the Army, Marines, national intelligence, and federal police) to provide any assistance required by the investigation, including access to their personnel and their archives.
Within 18 months, Gómez Trejo had undertaken a major housecleaning of his office, replacing career cronies with younger, committed investigators and prosecutors, many from outside the government. He and Encinas had searched dozens of sites and located the remains of two students. Arrest warrants were obtained for more than 80 suspects. The group of independent experts (GIEI) was invited back into the case. It was exciting to see the work that was getting done, the resources invested, the new technologies available, the searches underway, the multiple meetings, the assurances to parents, the skills and knowledge and expertise being poured into this case. To solve it and to find the boys.
So it’s hard to believe we are gathering today to mark ten years since one of the most shocking human rights atrocities to ever take place in Mexico and contemplating how completely the case has collapsed. It turns out, those early advances were the exceptions that proved the rule. Once the investigation began to find evidence of a military role in the crimes, President López Obrador became disaffected and the government’s cooperation began to wither – then curdled into open hostility. In 2022, the special prosecutor left the country in fear for his life. The commission head, Alejandro Encinas, resigned after learning he had been under military surveillance through Pegasus spyware. The GIEI jumped ship in 2023, accusing the Army and the Center for National Intelligence of sabotaging the investigation. No more students have been found. There have been no trials and no convictions.
No truth, no justice. This is the anniversary of impunity.
The title of my talk is half-borrowed from the title of an influential book published in 2011 by Harvard scholar Kathryn Sikkink called The Justice Cascade. In it, Sikkink proposed that with the end of the Cold War, some nations began organizing what had previously been impossible to imagine – criminal trials of the perpetrators of human rights abuses.
According to her research, once the political logic of the Cold War vanished, a powerful desire for truth, memory, and justice began to emerge in countries around the world, and specifically the desire to hold individuals criminally responsible for grave human rights violations. This global trend, as Sikkink identified it, took place within the context of the much broader arena of transitional justice, which included forms of truth-telling and memorialization, but the focus of her book was on the trials. Human rights trials were periodic and highly dispersed at first, but by the early 2000s turned into a flood – the cascade of her title. They were not homogeneous; they could be national courtrooms, regional bodies, special tribunals, cases of universal jurisdiction, all the way to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
My entire career at the Archive has been focused on the post-Cold War consensus in the Americas that the recovery of historical memory, truth-telling, transparency, and trials would not only strengthen democratic governance but also support social movements through recognition of their struggles, information about what truly happened, and accountability. I still believe this.
But it’s clear that the narrative of The Justice Cascade fails to address other powerful and insidious forces at work, even in those countries that convened the truth commissions, built the monuments, held the trials. I think, for example, of Guatemala, which shortly after the historic genocide trial of Ríos Montt careened into an aggressive authoritarian government that quickly dismembered the very justice system that had carried out that and other paradigmatic human rights trials. Obviously, individual criminal accountability through a justice system in and of itself does not lead to political, social, or economic justice.
Furthermore, while The Justice Cascade posits impunity as the opposite of individual accountability – in other words, impunity is literally when a person goes unpunished for a crime they committed – there’s another, more ferocious kind of impunity, a structural impunity, that is not addressed.
We could call it macro-impunity, in direct response to what has become a whole new field of violence studies in the Americas, called “macrocriminality.” Using the definition given by María Luisa Quintero (former Director of Investigations and Litigation at CICIG), macrocriminality is a system that functions at the intersection of three spheres: 1) the classic “criminal” (organized crime group), 2) economic, business (private interests, private companies), 3) and the public (agents of the State, whether police, judges, prosecutors, politicians, etc.). The three spheres collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive.
So we could say that macro-impunity would operate in a similar fashion, as those networks of actors from the public, private, and classically “criminal” spheres cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function.
In other words, macro-criminality is the crime, macro-impunity is the cover-up.
And the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is now a caso paradigmatico – not of Mexico’s ability to solve a complex human rights case for the very first time, as I know Prosecutor Gómez Trejo and his team had hoped and believed – but a paradigmatic case of macro-impunity.
In order to better understand the contemporary problem of macro impunity, we need to look at the history of impunity in the Americas – which for me starts in the United States, after the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the United States instrumentalized “national security doctrine” in order to protect US interests, and military governments south of the border largely signed on to the anti-communist project, converting it into the Dirty Wars of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. US support for repression in the hemisphere took many forms: military assistance, training in our military schools, weapons grants, and “technical assistance,” which meant access to advanced computers as well as surveillance and intelligence technologies. Physical and psychological torture techniques were recast as “interrogation methods” and formalized in official US military training manuals.
The rest of the hemisphere knew this – the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, they knew it; we trained their militaries for decades in the art of what US defense strategists called “internal security”: how to identify and eliminate the enemy hiding inside civil society.
Most US citizens did not know it or refused to know it. They were spared the firsthand experience of the Dirty Wars, of course. And the United States government was careful to shroud kidnapping, torture, and assassination programs in secrecy – especially at home. If there were activists and human rights groups and investigative journalists, a few members of Congress, who exposed the consequences of the US-supported counterinsurgency programs, most Americans accepted the propaganda manufactured by Washington that explained that the wars south of our border were dirty because that’s just how it was in Latin America. Latin America was made up of communist terrorists and brutal militaries, it was in their nature, a history of bloodshed going back hundreds of years. Even in internal, classified communications, US officials promoted this framing. “Guatemala is a violent society,” wrote one State Department analyst 38 years ago in a secret report on forced disappearance. “The conscious acceptance and use of violence as an instrument of politics contribute to the extraordinary levels of murder, kidnapping, and disappearances.” The analyst was referring to human rights violations committed by Guatemalan army officers and units the US had backed for decades.
The United States had less direct influence on the Mexican military because Mexico’s insistence on sovereignty kept the Pentagon mostly out of its defense affairs. At the same time, Washington had confidence in the ability of the PRI to control subversion, with or without US military assistance.
As a CIA secret intelligence estimate on “Security Conditions in Mexico” explained in 1966, “The government party virtually monopolizes politics and is an outstanding force for stability. Top government leaders are strong, determined men, conversant with the uses of power. Security forces are tough and well-trained; when so ordered, they carry out missions without overmuch regard for legalisms.”
“Without overmuch regard for legalisms”: That’s the CIA signaling impunity as a strategic advantage in Mexico.
1966 is about when Mexico’s Dirty War began, according to the truth commission, which issued its first report last month. By the mid-1970s, when political repression in Mexico reached its most intensive phase, US human rights policy was taking shape in Washington. As early as 1973, Congress began conditioning military assistance to countries on their human rights records. The Department of State instituted a new human rights reporting requirement for embassies around the world, and in 1977 compiled the first annual State Department Human Rights Report.
But Congress and later President Carter’s new commitment to human rights coexisted uneasily alongside US national security objectives in Mexico (and the rest of the Americas). Read the now-declassified communiqués sent by the US Embassy in Mexico City to Washington during those years and you can track how the US government sanitized Embassy reports of human rights abuses under the Echeverría regime for public consumption. In 1976, for example, political officer John Hamilton addressed the prevalence of torture in Mexico’s criminal investigations system.
“Torture and other similar violations of human rights frequently occur immediately after arrest during police interrogation… These violations occur in all kinds of instances, both in normal criminal arrests and in politically motivated detentions…. Although the Government of Mexico clearly does not condone this officially or publicly, it just as clearly tolerates the abuse so long as it does not result in embarrassing public disclosures. It undoubtedly is also limited in its ability to change this centuries old pattern.”
Although Hamilton used his best bland and bureaucratic language to describe the abusive practices of a close ally, the State Department’s first annual human rights report, issued one year later, stripped his references to torture and other violations altogether and pointed instead to the “strong enforcement actions” taken by Echeverría’s government against suspected terrorists.
The truth was US interests lay elsewhere. In 2003, I interviewed Lawrence Sternfield, the former CIA chief of station in Mexico who served in the mid to late 1970s. When I asked him about the CIA’s concerns about the excesses of the Dirty War at that time, Sternfield told me: "There was absolutely no mention of human rights while I was there. Not one word was spoken about it with my counterparts. It wasn't something that we broached or they broached. The relationship we had with the DFS was about pure intelligence gathering. This was the height of the Cold War, and our efforts were focused against the Soviet target. Not that we weren't aware that the Mexicans were doing bad things when they picked up people. But we didn't raise that with them."
As one former US ambassador told me a few years ago, “It’s always the fault of the United States!” But whether or not we want to make a direct, causal link between the hundreds of Mexican military officers who trained at the School of the Americas and the methods they used to crush dissent at home, we can recognize the erasure of the Dirty War in the official US record as a cover-up of Mexican repression in exchange for policy priorities that mattered more. Washington’s willingness to read authoritarian rule as an “outstanding force for stability” and to christen human rights abuses as “strong enforcement actions” point to what was actually important to US policy makers.
Mexico has always considered itself exceptional, and when the era of transitional justice dawned in the early 1990s it became the exception in how countries in the hemisphere grappled with legacies of political violence. There would be no truth commission. Memorialization was left to the victims and their families. No human rights trials would be held. Upon taking office in 2000, President Vicente Fox took the important decision to order an opening of Dirty War archives. When it came to truth-telling and accountability, however, he fell back on the old impunity playbook. With great fanfare he announced the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate past human rights crimes and prosecute those responsible, but the effort was an expensive simulation that ended with a whimper. FEMOSPP – the fake transitional justice effort – was dissolved in November of 2006, and days later Felipe Calderón was sworn into office as Mexico’s new President. One of his first acts in office was to declare war on the drug cartels and call in the military to assist.
The common critique of the war on drugs rejects the emphasis on punitive measures: drug addiction should not be criminalized and the effort to stop narcotics production should not be militarized. But maybe we should look at it from a different perspective. How does the war on drugs itself produce criminality?
Can we draw a line connecting the drug war and the disappearance of 43 college students in Guerrero?
Let’s recall the 1990s, when the United States crafted the “kingpin strategy” to combat violent drug trafficking organizations. It resulted in the takedown of major drug lords in Mexico. Analysts of counternarcotics policies have demonstrated that – like any corporate break-up – when the monopoly is dismantled, the dominant cartel fragments into smaller trafficking groups which, in their search for territory and market share, burrow into local communities and use any combination they can of bribes, favoritism, intimidation, and coercion, to extreme violence to increase their power.
One cartel dismantled under the kingpin strategy was Beltrán Leyva. After breaking with the Sinaloa Cartel, Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his brothers created a powerful, thriving criminal business that trafficked millions of dollars of narcotics annually. In order to protect it, they bribed national-level government officials such as Mexico’s drug czar and the head of the Attorney General’s organized crime division, SEIDO. In 2008, the US declared Arturo a kingpin, and the Treasury Department sanctioned him. In 2009 he was shot and killed by Mexican Marines, effectively destroying the organization. At least seven splinter groups took its place (according to InSight Crime) and competed with each other for territory. One of them was Guerreros Unidos, which from 2010 began controlling plazas in parts of Morelos, Estado de México and northern Guerrero.
By 2014, Guerreros Unidos was a pretty successful transnational drug trafficking organization. It wasn’t bribing Mexico’s drug czar but, according to investigators, they were bribing state officials in Guerrero, local mayors, municipal police, the head of the Guerrero office of the federal police, the commanders of two military bases, and employees of the bus companies that ferried their heroin from Iguala to Chicago, Illinois every day, returning with dollars. Then the attacks of September 26 happened.
Let’s read what Enrique Peña Nieto’s government declared about the night of Iguala. In the Informe de Caso Iguala, the official story released in 2016 (full of misleading and false information), the government described the attacks and then concluded, “These unfortunate events alerted us to abuse of power, corruption, and infiltration of some municipal police forces by criminal organizations in Guerrero’s northern zone.”
The response of the authorities to the disappearance of the 43 was not investigation but containment. The human rights atrocity was characterized as a common crime (kidnapping, homicide). Some municipal police were “corrupt” and acted in collusion with local thugs. A bone was planted and found, suspects detained and tortured, the official story became the historical truth, and as far as President Enrique Peña Nieto and everyone who reported to him were concerned, the case was closed.
Containment was necessary because it masked a monster. For every action that unfolded on the night of September 26-27 – as described by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and his chief of investigations, Tomás Zerón – there were countless other actions taken by people who were invisible in the official story. It took time and courageous effort on the part of the survivors and the parents of the missing students, the new investigating team, the forensic experts, and the GIEI, but the true dimensions of the atrocity began to be revealed. We learned of the complicities of the military battalions in Iguala, the Federal Police, state police, Ministeriales, Transit Police. The bus companies. The meetings held with the President to coordinate strategy, the roles of the Attorney General, Zerón, the Marines, Defense Secretary Cienfuegos.
These weren’t the people who seized the students, hustled them into the backs of trucks, and took them to their fates. These were the people who concocted a cover story and then did everything in their power to ensure the facts about that night would be suppressed. Because the truth about the night would expose the criminal networks that bound Guerreros Unidos not just to local police but to state and federal officials, to members of the Army, the Marines, to private companies. The truth would rearrange accepted definitions of who is the criminal and what is corruption.
As the students were being stalked and surveilled, then attacked in Iguala, thousands of miles away the DEA was wrapping up a criminal investigation it had launched in Chicago against a group of Mexican heroin traffickers who belonged to a gang called Guerreros Unidos. In December 2014 – just a few weeks before the Peña Nieto government would close the case with the verdad histórica – eight GU members were indicted, drawing on thousands of hours of surveillance over the course of a year and a half, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of intercepted text messages sent between the group in Chicago and their co-conspirators in northern Guerrero.
The messages contained running conversations about the mechanics of operating a heroin trafficking business. There were references to the passenger buses the GU used to transport drugs over the border into the US – the buses the students were riding in when they were attacked by police. Discussions of the system of roadblocks and lookouts maintained by collaborating police officers that kept the shipments safe. The traffickers planned meetings with municipal presidents, compared which officials got what bribes, name-dropped army commanders and other military officers on the payroll. They borrowed police cars to run errands without interference. They guided Marine patrols to the hide-outs of rival gangs to ensure their elimination. They organized special dinners for officers they were courting for favor. They complained about the greedy soldiers, who always asked for more no matter how much they gave them.
The investigators in Mexico and the GIEI didn’t see most of the intercepted messages until 2022. Despite the notoriety of the Ayotzinapa case, the Justice Department refused to share them for years, claiming they didn’t contain evidence related to planning or carrying out the students’ disappearance. When the National Security Archive got involved in 2017, it was at the request of the parents’ lawyers from Centro Prodh, who were trying to figure out how to obtain the DEA intercepts. We filed FOIAs and sued the government in federal court. Nothing a non-profit research institute could do succeeded in prying them loose, and they weren’t released until the President of Mexico asked the Vice President of the United States for them when Kamala Harris visited Mexico in late 2021. That helped. So did Mexico’s decision to extradite one of the accused Guerreros Unidos chiefs – Adán Casarrubias Salgado – to Chicago in May 2022. The messages were released to the special prosecutor a few weeks later.
I once asked a senior diplomat who was serving in the embassy when the boys were taken how the US viewed the Mexican government’s efforts to solve the case. He had sent a team of FBI agents to Iguala to provide technical assistance, and they returned to Mexico City with bad news. “The investigation was so disorganized,” he told me. “Mexicans had very poor practices, like not protecting the crime scenes. It was a bit frustrating for us since we had spent years and millions of dollars in training them in police and criminal investigation techniques!”
Unfortunately, the kind of impunity that protects criminal networks in Mexico can’t be improved with better police techniques. Not because the “drug lords” or the “cartels” are so powerful that they’re impervious to even the most skilled investigators. But because they’re part of a criminal system that includes the police chief we just trained or the Marine commander we invited to Washington for a conference on drug interdiction. Or a defense secretary like Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, awarded with the Pentagon’s Legion of Merit in 2018 for his “extraordinary contributions in strengthening the relationships between the militaries of Mexico and the United States.” In 2015, Cienfuegos refused to allow the soldiers stationed in Iguala to be questioned by investigators, a position he held until his retirement three years later. In 2020, he was arrested by DEA agents in Los Angeles on charges of drug trafficking.
US policy needs to recalibrate. The United States backed Calderón’s militarization plan with the Mérida Initiative, which pushed hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons, helicopters, vehicles, intelligence and other assistance to the Army and Marines for their cooperation in going after the traffickers. Today, the military is linked to multiple human rights violations that have gone mostly unpunished, and Sedena has more power to exercise civilian law enforcement than US laws would ever allow at home. But Washington continues to encourage the military’s lead role in the drug war. We’ve trained thousands of Mexican soldiers and Marines in counternarcotics – including members of the 27th Infantry Battalion, based in Iguala, in the weeks before the students were taken.
Why didn’t the US Justice Department release the intercepted messages to investigators for eight years, when they contained powerful evidence of the web of complicities that lay behind the disappearance of the students and the subsequent cover-up? The fact is, the Office of the US Attorney in Northern Illinois is concerned with targeting the heroin trade in the streets of Chicago and charging individuals for their roles in it – not macro-criminality in Mexico. By the same token, the hundreds of FOIA requests the Archive filed for information about Ayotzinapa have been met with silence: denials, continuing secrecy, extensive redactions, even of unclassified documents. From a US policy perspective, allowing even the most modest critique of Mexico’s actions in this case threatens bilateral relations on two of the most politically charged issues in Washington today: counternarcotics and migration. And so far, the US hasn’t been willing to take that risk.
There are other unintended consequences of the Chicago case on the Ayotzinapa investigation, rarely mentioned. When Adán Casarrubias was extradited to face trafficking charges, his defense lawyer got him a plea deal. As a result, there will be no public trial, and Casarrubias will never be compelled to speak about his role in Guerreros Unidos or say what he knew about the attacks against the students, their disappearance, or their collective fate. For the parents, that is a missed opportunity.
To borrow (and paraphrase) again from Kathryn Sikkink, in contrast to the “justice cascade,” the impunity cascade implies the growing legitimacy of the norm that accepts the lack of criminal accountability for human rights abuses and the absence of prosecutions. “The term captures how the idea started as a small stream, but later caught on suddenly, sweeping along many actors in its wake.”
The ways the logic and procedures of the US drug war feed impunity and strengthen it make the United State a partner in impunity with Mexico. Impunity-complicit. But as we’ve seen, impunity has its own history. The impunity of the Dirty War flowed naturally into the impunity of today’s permanent violence of the Drug War.
As John Gibler pointed out in the Afterword to his collection of oral histories – responding to Ernesto’s story about protecting the evidence after his companions were disappeared – it was the students who believed in the rule of law, who treated the site of attacks as a crime scene and protected evidence they knew the authorities would need to investigate properly. Even in Mexico, even in 2014, the urge to believe in justice existed, that justice was a real possibility.
That’s true today. The parents have to believe that their sons will be found and justice is possible. And we do too. But if we don’t challenge the militarized enforcement apparatus managed by the US and Mexico that produces criminality and reinforces impunity, we’re left with… rocks and sticks. Waiting for the detectives.
Thank you.