From whom can one demand justice if the same law that kills is the one that picks up the bodies? Where can one press charges if all the authorities are drenched in blood? The same law that takes measurements and conducts the investigation to discover who the killer is, is the one that committed the crime.

—Osiris in Alfredo Molano, Desterrados: Crónicas del desarraigo

FOREWORD

Silence Is Not an Option

DESAPARECER.

That verb, in Spanish, had always been a passive one when I was growing up: ¿dónde desapareció mi libro?, where did my book disappear to?, my mother or my father would wonder, trying to remember how that object could have been misplaced, who might have purloined or hidden it. Desaparecer was something that objects or people might do (“that cousin disappeared from our lives”) but not an action perpetrated on those things, and certainly not something done to human beings. This simple usage—in Spanish as in other languages like English—had been customary for hundreds of years.

And then, suddenly, in late 1974, early 1975, there was a drastic change in the way that verb was implemented. My wife and I were in exile from Chile, wandering the world after the bloody coup d’état overthrew our democratically elected President Salvador Allende. It was in Paris that we began to hear desaparecer deployed actively: lo desaparecieron, la desaparecieron, they disappeared him or her or them. To disappear became a verb that described a crime, an act of violence committed against someone, something done to a living human being.

That new usage, that twist in the language, did not derive from an arbitrary pronouncement by some obscure member of the Academy of Letters or the faraway compiler of a dictionary. It was due to the need of ordinary people to express a terrifying form of repression that was being massively exercised by dictatorial governments of the Southern Cone of Latin America. Agents of the State were kidnapping opponents of the regime and then denying their relatives any knowledge about the men and women who had been arrested. The use of desaparecer in this new way arose from the determination to assign blame to those agents and that State, rather than allowing those violations to be covered up and obfuscated.

It was a response to a particularly cruel form of terror: those in power were trying to savagely eliminate anyone who showed the slightest sign of insubordination, and yet whitewash themselves of any responsibility for that persecution. The dictatorship wanted to spread fear everywhere (Will I be next?, Will they take my son, my mother, my wife, my husband?) and simultaneously claim there had been no abuse of human rights.

What these governments did not understand was that the families of the desaparecidos, primarily the mothers, were not going to let their seres queridos simply vanish into the darkness. The world witnessed how those relatives stood up to the authorities, demanding that those who had been detained be returned alive or, if they had been murdered, that their bodies be released so they might have a proper burial and commemoration. Anything but the uncertainty of not knowing the final fate of those missing sons and daughters, husbands and wives and parents. Emblematic of this resistance were the photos pinned to the dresses of women or held aloft on placards at rallies or silent marches.

Though such acts of defiance had their start in Chile and Argentina in the mid-1970s, they soon became globalized, as globalized as the terror they were protesting. Over the decades we were to see relatives from Afghanistan and Brazzaville and Myanmar adopt the same tactics; we witnessed how the missing of Ethiopia and Cyprus and Cambodia were all memorialized in this way.

And now it is Mexico, and the vicious abduction of the students of Ayotzinapa that has horrified our sad planet. Now it is the turn of Mexican fathers and mothers, brothers and friends of survivors, to make the disappeared appear, to make them visible, to keep them alive.

That struggle for truth has found a vibrant and respectful embodiment—yes, that is the right word—in John Gibler’s heartrending, brave oral history of this collective fight against death, injustice, and oblivion.

Like the Mexican families who speak out in this book, he has refused to remain silent.

Precisely at a time when the United States is misgoverned by a belligerent bully who would like to make millions of Mexicans (not to mention other inhabitants of Latin American heritage) disappear from his country, precisely at a moment in history in which he and his followers dream of a gigantic wall separating these two bordering nations, this book propels us in another direction, jumping across those barriers with words that bring to the American public a tragedy that, if they are not careful, might someday violently touch their own lives.

Ayotzinapa is closer than you think.

—Ariel Dorfman, May 1, 2017

(Día de los trabajadores)

PROLOGUE

SOMETIME AROUND 9:00 P.M. on September 26, 2014, scores of uniformed police officers and a number of non-uniformed gunmen initiated a series of attacks against five buses of college students in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico; a bus carrying a third-division, youth soccer team; and several cars and taxis driving on the highway about 15 kilometers outside of Iguala. The attacks took place, at times simultaneously in multiple locations, for over eight hours. Municipal, state, and federal police, along with civilian-clad gunmen, all collaborated that night to kill six people, seriously wound more than 40 (one of whom remains in a coma), and forcibly disappear 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. The killers tortured, murdered, and cut off the face of one student, and then left his remains on a trash pile a few blocks from one of the scenes of attack.

From the beginning, the Guerrero state and Mexican federal governments lied about the attacks that took place that night in September. They minimized the significance of the disappearances and told stories of “confusion”—for example, that the “narcos” mistook the Ayotzinapa students for a rival drug gang. They tried, in various different ways,

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