Every morning, the newspapers in Mexico City announce how many days it has been since forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School disappeared while in Iguala, Guerrero. On Friday, the number—twenty-eight days—was accompanied by an announcement that the governor of Guerrero state, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, had finally resigned after weeks of outrage over the violence and lawlessness that marked his tenure.

The disappearance of the forty-three has aroused horror, indignation, and protest throughout Mexico and all over the world. An air of sadness, disgust, fear and foreboding hangs over Mexico City, where I live, like the unseasonably cold, gray, drizzly weather we’ve been having. This is usually a festive time of year, with the Day of the Dead holidays approaching, but it’s impossible to feel lighthearted. As one friend put it, the government’s cardboard theatre has fallen away, exposing Mexico’s horrifying truths.

The journalists John Gibler (the author of the book “To Die in Mexico”) and Marcela Turati (who has been reporting on the disappearance in the weekly magazine Proceso and elsewhere) have provided the most complete reports of what happened in Iguala on the night of September 26th. “Scores of uniformed municipal police and a handful of masked men dressed in black shot and killed six people, wounded more than twenty, and rounded up and detained forty-three students in a series of attacks carried out at multiple points and lasting more than three hours,” Gibler wrote to me in an e-mail. “At no point did state police, federal police, or the army intercede. The forty-three students taken into police custody are now ‘disappeared.’ ” On September 27th*, the body of another student turned up. His eyes were torn out and the facial skin was ripped away from his skull: the signature of a Mexican organized-crime assassination.

The Ayotzinapa Normal School trains people to become teachers in the state’s poorest rural schools. The students, who are in their late teens and early twenties, tend to come from poor, indigenous campesino families. They are often the brightest kids from their communities. According to Gibler, six hundred people applied to the class that included the students who disappeared, and only a hundred and forty were accepted. To become a teacher is seen as a step up from the life of a peasant farmer, but also as a way for those chosen to be socially useful in their impoverished communities. When Gibler and Turati went to visit the Ayotzinapa School in early October, only twenty-two students were left. In addition to the forty-three missing classmates, many others had been taken home by frightened parents.

Fifteen of the students Gibler and Turati met there had been present on the night of the violence. They told the journalists how much they’d been looking forward to that Friday, the first day they’d been allowed to visit their families since the beginning of the semester, a month before. They said they’d then been told that they would have to go on Saturday instead, because there was going to be an “action.” Mexico’s rural teachers colleges have a long tradition of leftist activism, but this would be the first “actividad de lucha” for most of these youths. They were to block a highway to solicit travel funds for the annual October 2nd march in Mexico City, which commemorates the 1968 massacre of student protestors in the Tlatelolco Plaza by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (P.R.I.) government of Díaz Ordaz. In keeping with protest traditions, they would temporarily commandeer busses from private bus lines for the trip to Mexico City.

That Friday, the students left in two busses, but needed two more, which is how they ended up in the small city of Iguala. They didn’t know that the politically ambitious wife of Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca, was giving a speech that evening. They also didn’t know that her brother, known as “El Molón,” was reputedly a leader of the narco-trafficking gang Guerreros Unidos, which, with the mayor, ruled over Iguala. The mayor and his wife have since been implicated in ordering that the students be massacred; they are both now on the run as fugitives.

According to Gibler’s account, on the night that the students disappeared Mayor Abarca sat next to the colonel in charge of the army base in Iguala. “The army colonel’s presence next to Abarca a few hours before the attack, and the army’s absence on the streets during and after the attack seem to me both linked and disturbingly suspect,” Gibler wrote. Subsequently detained municipal police have confessed that they and masked gunmen opened fire on the students twice, in at least two separate sustained attacks, and then turned the students over to sicarios from Guerreros Unidos. Guerreros Unidos has been hanging narco banners in Iguala that bear a chilling threat: if the twenty-two detained police are not freed, the narcos will murder innocents and release the names of the politicians who have supported their violent, criminal acts.

With Mayor Abarca and his wife on the run, we may never find out exactly why the Ayotzinapa Normal School students were so viciously targeted. Was it because they upset the mayor’s wife on the evening of her big speech? Was it an act of political repression against leftist student activists (who are overtly despised by the state’s political class and by the army), and thus also a threat directed against all leftists and activists? Those are among the possible motives mentioned in the media and by experts. But Mexicans know from experience that the motives behind acts of narco-state violence are often bewildering and senseless. What matters is that such acts happen because the groups responsible—both the narcos and the police and politicians who are allied with them and protect them—know that they can get away with almost anything.

The federal authorities and community groups searching for the missing students have turned up a multitude of clandestine graves, including one holding the remains of twenty-eight badly charred, recently slain bodies. But after the first round of DNA testing, authorities announced that the corpses were not those of the students. The sheer number of newly discovered graves seems to confirm what many journalists, human-rights workers, and others have long claimed: that since 2006—when, at the behest of the U.S., President Felipe Calderón, of the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (P.A.N.), militarized the fight against Mexico’s drug cartels, a policy continued by the current president, Enrique Peña Nieto—seventy thousand Mexicans have been killed and some twenty-seven thousand disappeared, effectively turning the whole country into a “narco grave.” Sixteen thousand Mexicans were killed in the violence of the narco war in 2013.

In a recent opinion piece, Alejandro Paéz Varela, the founding director of SinEmbargo.com, perhaps Mexico most influential digital news site, wrote, “Marches, protests, rage. International condemnation: the country which, according to the cover of Time magazine, was being ‘saved’ by Enrique Peña Nieto and his reforms is now, on second look, seen as one of savage and corrupt officials.” On Tuesday, I met Paéz for coffee at a Starbucks near his offices. “Congress just passed its annual budget, which is always a big story—the proposals, the negotiations, the votes—but this year it isn’t even front-page news,” Paéz said. “I can’t tell you if the education budget went up or down.” Paéz, like all of us, has been consumed by the tragedy of the missing students, but also by the resulting political repercussions and machinations. That drama, centered in Mexico City, seems to be providing new evidence of the lack of connection between the country’s politicians and their abandoned and often terrified constituencies. Protests in Guerrero and elsewhere have focussed on demanding the resignation of Governor Aguirre. In Chilpancingo, the state capital, protestors nearly burned the Governor’s Palace to the ground. Aguirre, from 1996-99, was the P.R.I. governor of Guerrero, “leaving behind,” according to Proceso magazine, “among other things, a gaggle of murdered P.R.D. party members.” The P.R.D. (Partido de la Revolución Democrática) though founded as an outgrowth of the P.R.I., has, in its rare, best moments, provided a functional leftist opposition over the last two decades to the P.R.I. and the right-wing P.A.N.