A protester in Mexico City holds a sign saying, “Mexicans, when will you burn? When the disappeared are from your house?” Photograph by Marco Ugarte / AP.

Read Francisco Goldman’s first report from Mexico.

On Sunday morning, a heartbreaking headline appeared on the news Web site SinEmbargo, which is based here in Mexico City: “I Know My Son Is Alive and That He Will Be a Teacher.” The speaker was Manuel Martínez, the thirty-five-year-old father of a seventeen-year-old boy named Mario, who has been missing since September 26th, along with many of his classmates at the Ayotzinapa Normal teacher-training school. That night, according to witness testimonies and the confessions of those arrested in the case, six students from the school were murdered by municipal police and other gunmen, and forty-three others were “disappeared” in the small city of Iguala, in the Pacific-coast state of Guerrero.

The Martínezes are indigenous Huave from the impoverished seaside village of San Mateo del Mar, in Oaxaca. Martínez told SinEmbargo’s Humberto Padgett that he’d also studied at Ayotzinapa, twenty years before, and that his son had long dreamed of following in his footsteps. Like many other rural schoolteachers, Martínez built his little school with his own hands, out of planks and zinc sheeting. “All the rural schools are bad,” he said. “Here and in the country, education is in terrible shape. ... In my school, we don’t even have electricity. The students live in the same conditions we do, or a little worse, because they live on just corn and beans, and from their tomato and chile_ _harvests. ... None of them owns a pair of shoes; they use huaraches or sandals.”

Martínez went on, “The authorities should pay for what they’ve done because they’ve done the very worse that you can do, to the most humble of people.”

The country has been seized by the story of the missing forty-three, though many refuse to believe the worst until it can no longer be denied—my dentist, for example, says that this is all just a student prank that went too far, and that the students will turn up any day now, sheepish and contrite. Meanwhile, concealed graves full of human remains keep turning up in the mountains and hillsides of impoverished Guerrero. One recently discovered grave held sandals and backpacks. Federal authorities discovered yet another grave on Monday, in the municipal dump of remote Cocula. There has been speculation that the grave could hold the remains of at least some of the students, but nothing has been confirmed yet. An announcement from the government could come any minute, or it might not come at all. Even if the government does announce that it believes it has found the students, it could take weeks before the independent Argentine forensics team working on the case can complete its DNA testing. That might be all the time that President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government will have to prepare for the widespread social tumult and condemnation that a confirmation of the students’ deaths is likely to provoke.

Every day, here in Mexico City and around the country, there are marches and other civic actions, most of them peaceful. On Wednesday, students from Instituto Politécnico Nacional, a large university in Mexico City, took control of toll booths on the highways leading into the city and allowed traffic to pass without paying. In Guerrero, protestors continue to burn government buildings. There will be a march in Mexico City on October 31st, coinciding with the Day of the Dead holidays, and a “mega march” is scheduled for November 5th, the day that Mexico’s universities and colleges are planning a national strike.

Many in Mexico have wondered why the missing forty-three have inspired such outrage in a country that has long since grown anesthetized to mass violence. This past June, twenty-two young people were massacred in a Mexico State warehouse by soldiers who claimed they’d been engaged in a long gun battle. The victims included a seventeen-year-old girl who was shot in the head. Her mother, when she recovered the body, said a soldier’s boot imprint was still visible on her daughter’s face. The case would have been covered up had it not been for human-rights groups and some early Associated Press wire-service reports bringing it to light. Even then, the Attorney General’s office didn’t agree to investigate the case until three more months had passed. Two weeks ago, in the city of Reynosa, a young physician and mother named María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio was kidnapped. She had been writing for the site Valor por Tamaulipas (where people post information and warnings about local narco activities) as an anonymous blogger, but narcos discovered her identity. Her murderers posted photos of her corpse on her Twitter account along with a tweeted message: “Close your accounts, don’t put your families at risk like I did, I ask your forgiveness.”

In the past, government authorities and many in the complicit media have relied on a worn playbook: stigmatize the victims, depict them as responsible for their own fates, or point out ways in which they were not “ordinary Mexicans.” Some have been trying to do the same with the missing forty-three, but the accusations and insinuations don’t resonate. Most of the students were still in their teens, in their first semester at the school, and came from impoverished communities that a majority of Mexicans can identify with; they can’t credibly be criminalized as “guerrillas” or “narcos.”

The outrage has brought a few promising results. The governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre, finally stepped down last week after a month of angry demands for his resignation. And something about this particular crime makes it seem like something that has happened—is happening—before all of our eyes: the worst that can be done, to the most humble of people. Nearly everyone seems to feel a little responsible for it, if only for having voted for a Mexican politician in any recent election. The crisis of the forty-three missing students has exposed—in what is perhaps an unprecedentedly clear and dramatic way—the direct lines that connect the most corrupt local authorities to the most élite national politicians.

The now former mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, Maria de los Ángeles Pineda, who are accused by Federal authorities of having ordered the attack on the students, are currently on the run. The Mexican media, including the newspaper El Universal, have been reporting that Governor Aguirre and Maria de los Ángeles Pineda were lovers. The mayor’s wife, now known as Lady Iguala in the press and on social media, has two brothers who are thought to be leaders of the narco group Guerreros Unidos, which supplies a great deal of heroin to the United States. Lady Iguala was preparing to succeed her husband as mayor, and she was giving a big speech on the night that the missing students rolled into town. She allegedly used Guerreros Unidos money to keep local police on her private payroll. Governor Aguirre, according to newspaper accounts, used to send his nephew to Iguala to pick up money from his lover—so much money, and on such frequent visits, that the nephew became known locally as the Lord of the Suitcases, for the manner in which he took the money away.

On September 29th, shortly before he disappeared, Mayor Abarca met with Jesús Zambrano, a political godfather and one of the two national leaders of the Partido Revolucionario Democrático (P.R.D.); the other is Jesús Ortega, who is known as Los Chuchos. The pair is credited with having led the party away from its traditional position of critical leftist opposition and moving it closer to the Partido Revolucionario Instítucional (P.R.I.), Mexico’s governing party. Aguirre, though he’d once governed Guerrero for the P.R.I., was reëlected governor in 2011 in a last-minute political “marriage of convenience” with the P.R.D.; he is a longtime P.R.I. heavyweight and a friend of President Peña Nieto. Many other leading politicians have been connected to Aguirre or accused of having known what was going on in Iguala. According to widespread accounts, Peña Nieto’s government and his Attorney General’s office were informed, in 2013, of the problem of organized crime and political corruption in Iguala and in other parts of Guerrero but did nothing about it. In this way, the tragedy of the missing students has thrown a spotlight on Mexico’s decadent political culture and has brought up important questions about the country’s mainstream parties.