Government Sponsored Murder

One journalists fearless investigation into a 2014 massacre that still grips Mexico

- Robert Valencia

On September 26, 2014, police in the Mexican town of Iguala intercepted a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, located in the Guerrero state, a region rife with drug-related violence. The students—also called normalistas—had been stopped for hijacking two buses to travel to Mexico City, where they intended to join the annual march that commemorates the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a national scandal in which hundreds of students and civilians were killed by the military. In the subsequent clash, six students, all in their 20s, were killed and another 25 wounded. Forty-three simply vanished.

The government’s official investigation found that authorities turned the normalistas over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which killed and then burned the missing students in a trash pit in Cocula. Mexicans rejected that version, and thousands demonstrated, shouting, “They took them from us alive, want them back alive” and “Fue el estado! [It was the state!].”

In March the office of the U.N. high commissioner for human rights found that the so-called Ayotzinapa investigation was inadequate and “affected by cover-ups.” For journalist Anabel Hernández, it was long-sought vindication. Hernández has been investigating collusion between government officials and drug cartels, as well as the illicit drug trade and abuse of power, for Mexico’s biggest publications for over two decades. Death threats from the cartels forced her and her family to leave the country— they now live in San Francisco—but she has continued to investigate Ayotzinapa. Using video from surveillance footage, medical reports and secret government documents, she pieced together her theory in A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students, first published in Spanish in 2016.