“Are the marches about Ayotzinapa? I’d like to go.” “It really isn’t safe. Protests here aren’t like in Australia.” Rocío had told me that in 1968, as a young university lecturer, he’d defied his own father to participate in Mexico City’s biggest ever demonstrations. Forty years on, though, his first instincts were protective. ©
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The protests were indeed about Ayotzinapa. On 26 September, 2014, in the state of Guerrero in Mexico’s southwest, municipal police picked up forty-three young male student protestors from the Ayotzinapa Normal School. They were never heard from again. The mayor of Iguala, where the mass disappearance took place, skipped town in the aftermath. He was accused of masterminding the attack, motivated by a long-standing grudge against activist students from the all-boys school. Mass graves were then discovered in the hills. But forensic testing revealed none of the remains found there corresponded with the missing students. By late October, when we arrived, people were criticising the federal investigation into the mass disappearance just as harshly as the complicity of municipal authorities. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto dragged his heels for nearly six weeks before agreeing to meet the disappeared students’ parents, at Los Pinos, his residence in Mexico City, on October 29. But the meeting, which took place at about the same time our flight was landing, only enflamed the situation. In footage leaked online, one father, Felipe de la Cruz, can be seen standing over the seated president and his colleagues, furiously berating them. He describes how his nineteen-year-old son, Ángel, narrowly escaped the fate of the forty-three by hiding behind a truck as police shot his best friend dead, and loaded the rest into patrol cars. Later, when Ángel took another wounded friend to hospital, they were refused treatment, and soldiers told them: “This is what you get. This is what happens to you for doing what you’re doing.” “We’ve reached the limits of tolerance and patience,” De la Cruz shouts at Peña Nieto in the video, with the president nodding along gravely like a scolded schoolboy. “We are demanding an immediate response, as Mexicans, from you, our president … Now that you’ve seen the anger of each and every parent, I hope that, like us, you can’t sleep soundly at night.” There was no immediate response. Following the meeting, the other parents voiced their anger to the national media: “¡Hijo de su puta madre!” said Mario César González: “Sons of whores! … They say our boys are dead. It’s a sick joke.” “I’m pissed off with this fucking government,” said another father, who didn’t give his name. “And with all the people who are still asleep because nothing has happened to them. They’re crouching down hiding letting it happen.” But Mexico was beginning to wake up. As the November Day of the Dead festivities ap-