The Mexican government says that it has provided “the historical truth” about how forty-three students disappeared in September. But the official account has been greeted with skepticism and scorn. Photograph by JESUS GUERRERO / AFP / Getty

This is the sixth part in Francisco Goldman’s series on the missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School. He has also written “The Disappearance of the Forty-Three,” “Could Mexico’s Missing Students Spark a Revolution?,” “The Protests for the Missing Forty-Three,” “An Infrarrealista Revolution,” and “Who is Really Responsible For the Missing Forty-Three?”

“They’re shooting at us!” “We’re not armed!” “Call an ambulance!” “My phone doesn’t have any credit left!” “Culeros!” “Is there anyone on the bus?” “They’ve killed one of us!”

It was March of this year, and a small group of people had gathered in a room at the Marriott Hotel in Brooklyn, as part of Amnesty International U.S.A.’s annual human-rights conference, to discuss the case of the forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, in Mexico, who have been missing since late September of last year. Projected onto a screen in the darkened room were clips from mobile-phone videos taken by students who survived that night’s attacks in the streets of Iguala, edited into one piece. It won’t be easy, I think, for anyone in that audience to forget the immediacy of the terror, chaos, and violence captured in those scenes, or the shouts of the students, terrified, angry, and sometimes defiant. One shadowy video shows a body, presumably a student, lying crumpled and still on the pavement, perhaps bleeding to death or already slain. In the weak glare of street lights, the constant gunfire in the darkness indicated that it was too dangerous for anyone to go to his aid.

“Why are you picking up those bullet shells?” “Notify the press!” “Stop picking up those bullet shells!” “You know what you did, you dog!” “We need an ambulance!” The shooting in the video was now heavy and loud, a dense, methodical barrage of gunfire, each shot like a bomb blast. I counted thirty shots packed into about fifteen seconds.

As we listened, the woman who was showing the videos interjected, in heavily accented English, “It was very dark, even the students couldn’t see who was shooting. Some of them did recognize [that] the federal police that works for the federal government was doing the attack, was doing the shooting. This last part of the video, it was very hot. It was recorded just before the students disappeared.”

The woman who spoke was Anabel Hernández, a noted Mexican journalist who is currently at the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California at Berkeley, which has been helping to support the reporting that she and her colleague Steve Fisher have been doing on the Ayotzinapa story, for the magazine Proceso. Hernández is in her mid-forties but looks ten years younger; she is a pretty, almost prim-seeming woman with a cheerful demeanor and a voice that rises resonantly when she is impassioned or indignant, as she certainly became while explaining the significance of what we were seeing and especially of what we were hearing.

“You fucking ball-licking dog!” “The police are leaving! The federales are staying, they’re going to want to mess with us.”

Eight months have passed since the forty-three students disappeared in the city of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, on the night of September 26th and the predawn hours of the following day. The crime ignited months of street protests and sent Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI government into an unprecedented credibility crisis (hastened by the exposure of other atrocities and corruption scandals) that prompted condemnation both from within Mexico and internationally.

On January 27th, the Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced that, after an exhaustive investigation, his office, the P.G.R., could now provide “the historical truth” of how the crime had transpired. The case, he argued, should be considered essentially closed so that it could proceed to the prosecution stage.

According to the government, on the night of September 26th, as many as a hundred Ayotzinapa students, travelling in commandeered buses on the streets of Iguala and a peripheral highway, came under attack by gunfire from municipal police in a series of incidents. Six people were killed, including three students, a woman riding in a taxi, and the driver and a passenger on a bus carrying a Chilpancingo soccer team, which was mistakenly targeted; another Ayotzinapa student, shot in the head, remains in a coma. One student was found dead the next morning, the skin of his face peeled off. And, before dawn, police abducted forty-three of the students and turned them over to a local drug-trafficking gang known as Guerreros Unidos. The forty-three were transported, in two trucks, to the Cocula municipal dump and left in the hands of three of the group’s sicarios, or gunmen. According the Attorney General’s account of the gunmen’s confessions after they were captured, about fifteen of the students were already dead on arrival at the dump, either from gun wounds or because they’d asphyxiated during the short journey. The gang members forced the still-living students to kneel, brusquely interrogated them, and then executed them. The forty-two corpses were laid on a pyre of wood, tires, and plastic; doused in diesel and gasoline; and set aflame, in a fire that burned for fifteen hours, until about four the following afternoon. Then the gunmen gathered the incinerated remains into eight plastic garbage bags, which they tossed into the nearby San Juan River.*

In Murillo Karam’s account, the students left Ayotzinapa on the 26th in two buses and headed for the state capital, Chilpancingo, in order to raise funds by stopping traffic on the highway outside the city and to commandeer more commercial buses for transporting students to Mexico City for the annual commemoration of the 1968 student massacre in the city’s Tlatelolco Plaza, on October 2nd. “But they went directly to Iguala,” Murillo Karam said. “On their way, they’d been instructed that they were to go there to block a political event.”

Why had there been an assault? According to the government, the mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, triggered the police attack by ordering that the students be detained “como sea,” by any means. Abarca’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda (who had four brothers, at least three of whom belonged to Guerreros Unidos, though two had been slain) was presiding over the political event, which was meant to position her to succeed her husband as mayor. But when the students reached Iguala, according to Murillo Karam, a halcón, or lookout, for Guerreros Unidos mistook the buses full of students for an incursion by Los Rojos, a rival drug gang, and he passed this information to both the gang and the municipal police. So the students had angered the mayor by coming to Iguala to upend his wife’s event, but they were also mistaken by Guerreros Unidos and by the police for members of Los Rojos. Murillo Karam emphatically reiterated that no federal forces were involved in that night’s events. Both the federal police and the Mexican Army have bases in Iguala, but there was no reason for the P.G.R. to investigate any possible federal role.

Murillo Karam declared that his office had already arrested ninety-nine people. He said, “This is the historical truth of what occurred, based on proofs supported by science, as included in the case record, and which has enabled us so far to take punitive action.” He stressed that an Argentine forensic team participated in all of the crime-scene forensics investigations.