Arturo Cano, who has written on teachers in Mexico and their powerful labor union, told me that rural teachers’ colleges are regarded with pride as cradles for leftist activists and even militants. More than a few enterprising graduates of that system have become political bosses and labor leaders. Generations of Ayotzinapa students have served poor communities, agitated, and organized for social justice.

Typical ‘normalistas’

On the day they disappeared, the 43 were being typical normalistas. They wanted to get to Mexico City to march with other students on the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre — the day in 1968 when government forces killed as many as 300 students in an urban square 10 days before Mexico hosted the Olympic games.

The Ayotzinapa students wanted to attend a march honoring students who died in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre.

The students wouldn’t make it to the march in Mexico City without buses. So, like typical, rabble-rousing normalistas, they thought of going to Iguala — a market city about two hours from their school — and taking some. Activists in Mexico frequently commandeer municipal buses for political purposes. While it is “of course illegal,” says Arturo Cano, the practice has been “more or less tolerated for a long time.”

A big band of normalistas arrived in Iguala on September 26, 2014. They found three buses, but they never made it to Mexico City.

What happened in September

The city of Iguala is known in Mexico for the constellation of gold mines still producing in the hills nearby. In 1821, a tailor from Iguala designed Mexico’s distinctive tricolor flag: green for independence, white for religion, and red for the union of Spanish and indigenous people. For my grandfather and his siblings, Iguala was a bustling provincial center (compared to their little town) and an essential stop-over between the provinces and Mexico City.

Before last September, when most Mexicans thought of Iguala, they thought of these bits of trivia and, maybe also, the distinctive ice cream offered in shops surrounding its central square.

Not anymore. Now Iguala is the last place the 43 were seen alive on that day in September. Iguala police confronted the group of students shortly after they commandeered the buses they sought. The situation escalated quickly, and the police attacked their caravan with an inexplicable fury.

Police killed six people and wounded twenty-five others, including some bystanders, in two distinct and extended assaults that night. When the body of a student named Julio César Mondragón was discovered the day after the assaults, his eyes were gouged and the skin was flayed from his face.

The scene after the killing in Iguala. AFP

In the hours following the assaults, it is said that the police kidnapped María Micaela’s son Abel and the others. Evidently, at some point in the dark hours of September 27, the police handed 43 students over to a narco cartel called the Guerreros Unidos.

What happened after that is not clear, but Mexican officials believe they know. In November, the federal government announced that it apprehended three members of the Guerreros Unidos. Their grisly confessions gave shape to the official account: the gang dismembered the students at a local garbage dump then burned them in a giant pyre. A month later, in December, officials announced that DNA tests had identified one missing student, Alexander Mora, among the ashen and pulverized remains.

A ‘juridical truth’

This would seem to be the starting point, not the terminus, of an investigation — especially since no other students were identified. Feeling pressured to produce answers, however, the government said that it knew enough and it could conclude that all 43 young men shared Mora’s fate.

Alexander Mora Venancio.

Arturo Cano says this is part of a “juridical truth” that the government seemed bent on finding fast, after a few weeks of groping for evidence in a “clumsy, messy, and inconsistent” investigation. What begins as a plausible narrative (a sort of best-fit line for a set of facts) becomes an official version becomes, eventually, the “juridical truth” when supported by the right quantum of evidence and announced from the right dais.

The “juridical truth” is the truth for the government’s purposes, and it has two halves. First, the students are dead, no matter the lack of forensic evidence. The state has a strong legal incentive for this to be so. As long as the students were considered “disappeared” rather than deceased, the question of official involvement in that disappearance would remain open, and the government would have a heightened responsibility to investigate.

Second, this is an “isolated case,” to use the words of Mexico’s new attorney general Arely Gómez González. The government arrested the mayor of Iguala Jose Luis Abarca and his wife in November, calling them the probable masterminds of the kidnapping. In January, federal authorities charged Abarca formally.

Ms. Gómez’s predecessor Jesús Murillo Karam — who was sacked in February — had already sketched a sinister portrait of Iguala’s first couple. (By the time the news media filled out that picture with accounts of ties to organized crime and an irresistible MacBeth narrative, the mayor and his wife seemed more than capable of an “isolated” atrocity.) It was said that Abarca instructed police to arrest the students on September 26 because they were about to disrupt an event aimed at promoting his wife politically. When things got out of hand, the government says, it was Abarca who ordered police to hand the students over to the Guerreros Unidos.

The attorney general makes the case against Iguala’s first couple. AP Photo/Marco Ugarte.

Why, though, would the police heed such a blood-thirsty request, even from the mayor? And why would the Guerreros Unidos take the contract? In a press conference, the former attorney general tried to bind the theory together with a slander: probably the narco hitmen mistook the students for a rival gang.

In one light, the government’s version looks credible — a transparent, warts-and-all account of corruption and abuse of power. Here are the feds handing over public officials and, implicitly, indicting the broader system.

To many, though, the government’s truth feels too light. For one, Arturo Cano suggests, it lacks a plausible motive. The state admits astounding corruption in city government and a ghastly nexus with the drug trade, but when that nexus kills innocents at this scale and ferocity — well, there must have been some kind of mistake.

Questions of state

It is an understatement to say that the government’s account fails to satisfy most Mexicans; it insults them. Almost instinctively, they noted the missing motive. In its place, they sensed grander corruption and the pattern of coverups that have followed other recent massacres and disappearances.

The people that Arturo Cano talks to in Guerrero don’t entirely buy the municipal MacBeth story or the theory of mistaken narco identity. For one thing, most residents know that Iguala’s mayor did not have command of the police in his city; the Guerreros Unidos did. According to the testimony of many locals, the narcos controlled the cops directly and maintained a special uniformed unit whose members took on the dirtiest jobs.

Investigators near the dump in Cocula, Guerrero, where the government says the 43 were taken and burned. Rebecca Blackwell/Reuters.

In light of those reports, even the government’s seemingly forthcoming and penitent account simply does not add up. It doesn’t begin to answer the questions that Mexicans have carried into the streets since September. Questions like these:

Alexander Mora is dead, but where is the forensic evidence accounting for the 42 others? Why would the police attack a group of student activists with such rabid force? What about the problems that academics and independent Argentinian investigators found in the government’s investigation and in its timeline? Why would a group of narco traffickers, not known for fastidiousness in these matters, choose to cremate the students? And how did they keep the fire stoked during a night of rain? What was the role of army personnel, who regularly harassed normalistas and, according to witnesses, appeared at the scene of the police attack?

Another set of chilling questions grows as the search for the 43 turns up dozens of secret, comingled graves in Guerrero: if they’re not the students, who are these people buried in the dusty hills around Iguala? And who killed them? (Cano says these are dozens among hundreds of unmarked graves around around the country. Every week more are discovered.)

Rural police arrive in Iguala. Miguel Tovar/STF/LatinContent/Getty Images.

Cano ventures that these particular graves must have something to do with the fact that Iguala, the birthplace of the Mexican flag, would be better described now as one of the opium capitals of Guerrero. As of 2009, the state state was home to 70 percent of Mexico’s opium gum production in a national heroin industry worth $17 billion. Is there anything else that could account for so much death?

This begets a final set of questions — the most dangerous ones to ask, because they answer themselves almost immediately. Regardless of whether they died or how they died, aren’t the missing Ayotzinapa students 43 more souls for the government’s running tally of people “disappeared” due to the the Drug War began in 2006? The month before the students set off for Iguala last year, that statistic increased to 22,322 missing — to say nothing of those confirmed dead.

In this context, is it just to speak only of the local mayor, his wife, and their enablers — as evil as they seem — as the culpable parties? Shouldn’t the President of the United States, if he thinks that this crime was “gruesome” and unbecoming a civilized country, reconsider the gruesome, ongoing war that the U.S. directs and finances in Mexico via the Merida Initiative?

Peña Nieto visits Obama in the White House, January 2015. Official White House photo.

For a moment last fall, Peña Nieto’s administration seemed to stumble in the face of these questions. Arturo Cano told me that, under pressure, the President showed his true colors — those of the old PRI party that ruled Mexico for 70 years with repression, authoritarian power, and graft. Human rights groups hoped that the United States would take notice of Mexico’s “worst human rights crisis in years” and change policy.

Now, with an official account to rally around, the powers that be feel freer to ignore all of these issues. Forty-three boys are dead in an isolated case. If that mantra does not have the satisfying power of truth, the government says it has also delivered accountability. It charged Mayor Abarca, forced out the governor of Guerrero, and dismissed an attorney general over this affair. This is, according to the government, what a civilized state looks like.

However, as long as these questions and many more go unanswered (or at least uninvestigated), people will regard the government’s actions as tokens and illusions — accountability itself being an illusion without credible information. In light of the facts already known — which are horrifying and outlandish but, sadly, beyond dispute — who but the most cynical or the most naive would dismiss these questions or call them ridiculous?

Reward and photographs advertised by Guerrero’s state government.

A different death

Denied official answers to these questions, Mexicans are organizing for truth and accountability while parents like María Micaela Hernández anguish over their sons’ every conceivable fate:

María thinks her son lives. That belief — shared by many, if only in solidarity — is keeping these questions alive in the streets and squares. Last month, Abel’s classmates clashed with police in Guerrero and relatives of the 43 began a tour of the United States that stopped in Boston last weekend. On Sunday, relatives and supporters will gather in New York to march to the United Nations and demand that Mexico reopen the investigation.

The government does not want the matter reopened. For official Mexico, there no questions to answer; the students are dead, it is time to move on.

Probably a new, competent investigation would find that the state is right, if only in its final conclusion — that María’s son Abel died with all the others. Forty-three more souls among thousands, whether you want to call them Drug War casualties or victims of state violence.

For now, however, the survivors and relatives do not accept the government’s account. This was the message of the Ayotzinapa families when they testified Friday in a truth tribunal at CUNY Graduate Center in New York and throughout a two month tour of the United States. On Friday, Vidulfo Rosales Sierra, a human rights lawyer traveling with the group, said that the families have long distinguished between the government’s story — the juridical truth — and the “historical truth,” which the families still seek.

Blanca Vélez Nava, whose son Jorge is among the disappeared, told the hall at CUNY: “We won’t stop. There are days I wake up, and I don’t know what day it is. I just know that my son is somewhere. That’s what I ask God for, to see him alive.” She does not believe a word of the government’s account. “I want him alive,” she said, “we have to arrive at the truth.”

María and Blanca must understand it is likely that their sons are dead. And yet why should they accept the government’s story as the truth? Without more proof or a credible investigation, the state can be right about the fate of the 43 but wrong nevertheless about most every other detail and circumstance. The “what” is not the truth without the “how” and the “why.”

Vidulfo Rosales Sierra leads Ayotzinapa families demanding the 43 alive in Brooklyn on April 25

Until there is a credible account, the 43 will languish — with 23,000 other disappeared Mexicans — in a space of unknowing, up in the dusty hills where death is probable but not confirmed. The families have embraced this uncertainty. Their demand is now political and increasingly dangerous to the state because it defies mortality: the government, which says the boys are dead, must produce them alive, con vida.

Eventually, though, ordinary Mexicans will answer their own questions about that night in September. After years of murders and disappearances, they know that the truth is always worse than what is told officially. They don’t know what happened exactly, but if Abel is gone, Mexicans know in their bones that he had a different death.