“A look around us at this moment shows what the regression
of bourgeois society into barbarism means.”—Rosa Luxemburg
The attack on the Ayotzinapa teaching students on September 26, 2014 left dozens of people wounded—one of whom is still in a coma—and six people dead. The ambush and disappearance of the 43 students, at the hands of the police and (it is now presumed) the army, left sinister traces, symbols of unparalleled cruelty, like the body of a student who had been savagely tortured and was left with his face torn off and his eyes gouged out. Today, almost three years later, the crime in Iguala, Guerrero continues to trouble the psyche, not only because of the cruelty, but because the incident reveals the level of social disintegration and human degradation that has been reached. It was a paradigm shift, the consequences of which remain to be seen in severity and reach.
After Ayotzinapa, the entire country protested in numbers not seen since the Zapatista uprising twenty years earlier. It reopened the deep wounds of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, and the more recent trauma of the hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of armed violence over the last decade. Government buildings were engulfed in flames. Demands for the resignation of the president were chanted in marches of hundreds of thousands. Strikes, rallies, and enormous demonstrations by unions, students, and other sectors of the population thundered across the nation. By the end of 2014, the case was taking over headlines, auditoriums, and social media. and was inspiring protests around the world.
Meanwhile, the Mexican authorities struggled from the beginning to defend their version of the events, attempting to link the students to criminal activities. The Ayotzinapa students were “no saints,” said the Attorney General. Five months later, with the 43 still missing, the Attorney General complained on national television that he was “tired” and promptly closed the investigation. At the same time, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) — a group of international investigators — along with several independent journalists, continued their investigations, which in the end disproved the “official” version of the case. Importantly, they revealed the government’s role in the attack, as well as the government’s cover-up and their wholesale fabrication of an alternate reality.
What has been thrown into stark relief is not only the symbiosis between the state and the drug cartels, but the abject nature of Mexico’s ruling class. The scandal embroiled the entire political spectrum. The country’s electoral landscape was decidedly changed, triggering a crisis for the center-left and further discrediting the right. In response, major social unrest shook the country during the months that followed. Guerrero and other southern states were set ablaze by ever more violent protests. Students and the teachers’ union closed schools, blocked roads, and organized caravans and assemblies. In response to these protests, state repression intensified. Mass detentions came one after another, the media smear campaign escalated, and the militarization of Guerrero was further reinforced through the deployment of newly-created bodies of militarized police to the region.
Almost three years after the events in Iguala, the mobilization of students, relatives of the missing, and the Ayotzinapa community persists in spite of all kinds of scare tactics and attempts to vilify them. The most recent episode of harassment came to light when evidence surfaced that a surveillance campaign was being secretly carried out against the GIEI investigators and defense attorneys.[i]
However, with the GIEI’s final report last year and the publication of several pieces of investigative journalism in the past few months, the case has regained the public’s attention.[ii] The new revelations have corroborated the coordination of federal and local forces with the drug cartels. They have attributed responsibility for the crime itself to the army, and have highlighted that high-ranking officials and the armed forces had real-time knowledge of the attacks as they unfolded.[iii] They have also denounced the dozens of crimes—kidnappings, rapes, and torture—committed by the government, with the aim of planting evidence and fabricating confessions to support its version of the events.[iv]
The destiny of the missing students, meanwhile, remains a chilling mystery. The Iguala case has become emblematic of the despotism of an elite accustomed to impunity, as well as of the clamor for justice raised by the most vulnerable sectors of Mexican society. But this clamor extends beyond this particular case, raising questions about the underlying forces that are generating the dystopia that is engulfing the nation.
What lies at the heart
The Ayotzinapa case was a watershed moment. It prompted increasing numbers of people to realize that the state is responsible, in large part, for the violence that has been justified in the name of the war on drugs and organized crime. What happened in Iguala was not a case of a few bad apples in a local police department. On the contrary, it was the last straw that exposed how the army, the federal police, and the local police act in conjunction with criminal groups to terrorize the population. This systemic collusion is the reason why no one person or group can take complete responsibility for the disappearance and massacre of the students. The acts were facilitated by the superimposition of various forms of control under capitalism: impunity, racism, militarization, and paramilitarization. These have been created and sustained not just by the Mexican government, but by the United States and other powers, ultimately to serve the interests of transnational capital.
Over the last four decades, Mexico has transitioned from a nationalized economy to a “free trade” model focused on maquiladoras and export manufacturing. The recent structural reforms of the current government, centered on privatizing the energy sector, as well as brokering new international treaties and opening Special Economic Zones in the center and south of the country, are the next stages in the pillage of the Mexican economy that began with NAFTA in 1994. Leaving the country deeply indebted and more vulnerable than ever, this process has simultaneously dismantled social welfare programs and deepened levels of poverty while heightening social unrest.[v] This year alone, drastic increases in the price of gasoline, along with the dramatic devaluation of the peso, brought on protests, looting, and riots across the country.[vi]
Dismantling historic social programs and privatizing public institutions has come at the expense of the unions and social defense organizations that emerged after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. Launched in 2006, the war on drugs has served a policy of class war and social control: an ongoing preventive strike continual economic shock therapy that the country has suffered since the end of the 20th century. To this end, the government has increasingly relied on a strategy that has kept the army in the streets for over a decade. This has facilitated the mobilization of troops and the use of counterinsurgency tactics and overt paramilitarism––or paramilitarism disguised as criminal groups––directed against the civilian population.[vii]
The war on drugs in Mexico is the corollary of the drug war that the U.S. has been waging on the international level. The Merida Initiative—an updated version of Plan Colombia from the 1990s––is described as an “anti-drugs and anti-crime assistance package for Mexico and Central America.” In actuality, it has served to finance the unprecedented expansion of the Mexican state since 2008, with its principal objective being to safeguard foreign investment in those countries.[viii] It comes as no surprise, then, that the President of Mexico named, as his public security advisor, the former director of the Colombian national police and “righthand man” of the DEA in that country. Today, he stands accused by the DEA itself of “favoring the creation of paramilitary groups in the state of Michoacán and having links to drug cartels.”[ix]
The U.S.-centered drug market is the great source of deregulated income that lubricates this repressive strategy. The United States has historically used drug trafficking and drug production as a weapon of colonial penetration.[x] However, today it is a multibillion dollar business centered on the American and European markets, and it forms an important part of the world economy, with enormous profits that even helped mitigate the impact of the 2008 global economic crisis through money laundering (The Guardian, 2009).[xi] Moreover, some of the world’s largest banks have in recent years been repeatedly involved in money laundering scandals.[xii] Thus, the money that finances the clandestine arming of the underdeveloped world is a crude expression of the moral bankruptcy of global financial capital.[xiii]
Exemplary punishment
To date, the most well-known investigations in the Iguala case have suggested that the motivation for the shooting and ambush of the students stemmed from a coincidence: an attempt by state forces to retrieve drugs that, unbeknownst to the students, were being transported on at least one of the buses that the students had commandeered on the night of September 26th. Investigations by journalists also indicate that the disappearance of the students was ordered as a way to cover up the role of the police in recovering the drugs. However, the first report of the GIEI states:
“The massive character of the action, the large number of victims, the fact that it took place on many locations and at various times, the presence of many possible witnesses, the arrest of the students, the use of identifiable municipal patrol cars, among other factors, seems to denote more of an action oriented toward not letting the buses leave and/or punishing the students for their actions [commandeering of the buses], than one aimed at concealing the facts from the beginning.”
The “punishment” took its clearest form in the torture, execution, and hunting down of the students by the police and the army during the night of the 26th and early hours of the 27th throughout Iguala, and, of course, in the decision to forcibly disappear 43 students. Even with the recovery of drugs as the principal motive for the initial attack, the escalation of violence denotes some other motivation. The state knew that the victims were not an ordinary group of people, but rather a political student organization with links to a wider social network, which would not accept the typical modus operandi of state terror.
Rural teacher training schools like Ayotzinapa have historically been targets of the government. The dismantling of public education lies at the root of their long-standing stigma and victimization. Their students have been murdered, tortured, and imprisoned because they represent a poor, indigenous, rural or peasant sector that has access to education and a long tradition of social awareness and struggle. In this context, the teacher training schools have frequently been supported by the teachers’ union and other regional social groups in their long fight for their very existence. The state knew that this support network would not remain silent in the face of these events. As journalist Anabel Hernández mentioned at a conference in Mexico City: “The government thought [the students] were enemies, and it seems to me that this contempt by the state for Ayotzinapa allowed impunity.”[xiv]
To date, no investigation has considered the overall political context and the role of the social struggle in Mexico during 2014. In the current narrative, the Ayotzinapa school is often linked to guerrilla groups as part of the media stigma against rural teacher training schools. This narrative seems to obviate, however, that Genaro Vázquez, Arturo Gámiz, Lucio Cabañas, and many other guerrilla leaders were not teacher training students themselves, but rather members of a teachers’ union that belonged to larger social movements of greater significance. The teacher training students are the weakest link in the network of social organizations in Guerrero, due simply to their nature as a student group lacking a nationwide union organization with socio-economic power or other forms of social defense. If there was a target to use in order to send a message to the rest of the social groups in Guerrero — and in the country — it was the teacher training students. But what was that message?
The crime in Iguala took place at a pivotal moment for Mexico. The imposition of structural reforms in 2013 had stirred up profound social discontent, and for the vast majority of the country, this meant the death knell of 20th century living standards. The approval and promulgation of the changes came about in a torrential flood. In less than two years, Congress approved eleven Constitutional reforms in the areas of energy, finance, labor, telecommunications, and education, among others.[xv] The major political parties had signed a pact in 2012 agreeing not to impede the approval of the reforms. In this context of monolithic party politics, opposition to these changes came from one of the few unions that had not been destroyed or paralyzed by previous regimes.
The dissident teachers’ union organized massive sit-ins, strikes, protests, and blockades of airports and highways all across the country in opposition to the educational reforms.[xvi] This antagonism toward the government intensified with the burning of the PRI party headquarters in Guerrero during a teachers’ protest in April of 2013.[xvii] Shortly afterwards, the teachers set out on national caravans to “bring together forces…workers, peasants, and civil society, to confront the education reform in every corner of the country.”[xviii] The defense of public education became the principal site of opposition to the reforms, and in particular, it galvanized the struggle of the teacher training students, who had maintained their own mobilizations for years prior.
By 2014, protests had spread across the nation to include other social sectors, including health workers, peasants from the north and center of the country, and university students.[xix] In August of that year, the energy reform was promulgated, and days later, a new police body started operations: the Gendarmería Nacional, which would take command of Iguala after the student massacre. The government’s approval ratings were plummeting due to the unpopularity of the reforms.[xx] Notwithstanding, two weeks before the events in Iguala, the President was rejoicing at the finance reform’s approval in Congress.[xxi] But a rising trade-union resistance was looming as a real problem for the government agenda.
The extreme violence of the execution and mass disappearance of the students (almost the same number of people massacred in Acteal in 1994) reflects either a high degree of paranoia or an appallingly vicious calculation by the government. Considering that the government monitored the events in real time, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that the decision to escalate the atrocity was conscious, taken knowing full well the enormous social reaction that it would provoke. This was an exemplary punishment with a clear political agenda, staged in a region with a history of guerrillas and radical social movements, which at the time was going through a period of extreme social volatility. All speculation aside, however, the undeniable effect of Ayotzinapa was to generate confusion, social psychosis, and subsequently, temporary political demoralization. Criticizing the economic strategy of the government suddenly lost relevance and was relegated to the background as attention shifted toward the search for the missing. This, in turn, halted the momentum that the opposition had generated up to that point.
Justice
The attack on the students and its aftermath politicized new social sectors. In the spring of 2015, relatives and friends of the students spearheaded international caravans to demand the return of the disappeared. The families, in particular, used their speeches to articulate the contradiction inherent in demanding justice from the very same state that had kidnapped their children––the same state that six years earlier had exonerated former president Luis Echeverría on all charges of genocide in relation to the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. The latter is a case that epitomizes the sort of legal justice to which victims of state violence in Mexico can aspire.[xxii]
What justice can be found in the indictment of individuals when the governmental shell game continues to protect an unscrupulous technocracy, so willing to do anything to stay in power? The main problem is not corruption, but rather the system that subordinates debtor countries to the interests of the creditor market, engendering massive class inequality and ever greater social pathologies. This system will continue to set rural students defending meager funding for education against police and governments seeking to destroy their only escape from a destiny of archetypal poverty, racism, violence, and marginalization. This is a social order that will continue to produce massacres of indigenous people like those at Acteal and Aguas Blancas, or mass graves like those of San Fernando and Cadereyta, crowded with the bodies of Central American migrants whose only economic alternative is that of exodus.
While the forensic investigations prompted a broad denunciation of the Mexican government, no international court or criminal prosecution can supplant the need for a social process in which the victims, and the society affected by the military imposition of a new economic and political paradigm, can publicly debate the appropriate forms of government and social organization required to overcome the problem. What is at stake today goes beyond the whereabouts of the missing students or the indictment of venal authorities as a band-aid for a larger cancer. Justice for Ayotzinapa must mean a renewed capacity for the excluded, the oppressed, and the exploited to participate, fully and on their own terms, in the society that they themselves have constructed with their work, remittances, sacrifices, and social labor. Ayotzinapa cannot become just another rallying cry exploited by politicians and institutions whose sole purpose, after being elected, is to preserve the status quo. This will only continue to pave the way for the armed vigilantism that today props up the state as its para-police assistance, but is bound eventually to succumb to a growing military siege.
In June of 2015, the Ayotzinapa movement and the southern teachers’ union carried out an active boycott of the elections in Guerrero and other states. This was a response to the pretension, farce, and humiliation of a political establishment that has done nothing but attempt to silence dissent by any means. The protesters decided to reject the current system of electoral peonage, a system that only serves, or attempts to serve, as a superficial outlet for social discontent. For almost 50 years, capital in Mexico has underpinned this electoral regime as—according to politicians, political parties, and sycophantic intellectuals—the country’s antidote against another Tlatelolco student massacre. However, the latest refutation of this grand chimera occurred in September 2014. Political groups and their agendas have proven themselves to be so dependent on foreign capital as to not be able to put forward a true proposal for social progress by and for the majority. On the contrary, they promote a false dichotomy between technological advancement and social equality, between progress and social justice. Such distinctions do not exist from the point of view of someone who has nothing but their lifeblood to offer the market. A life cannot subsist on justice without bread, nor bread without justice. A life is both the limit and the center of humanity, as humanity cannot be called such when it remains alienated from itself.
Dignity
Ayotzinapa has politicized a new generation of social activists. It is vital that they take stock of what has been achieved up to now, the limitations as much as the prospects for the future. Clearly, an outpouring of support moved the case beyond the realms of intimidation and forgetting. Such notoriety, however, can dissipate with time if it is not translated into a political expression that continuously evolves and progresses. Omar García, a survivor of the massacre in Iguala, rightly pointed out in an interview conducted at the end of 2014 that:
“The person speaking to you is a student who already considers himself dead because, right now, we’re not only fighting against state institutions, we’re fighting against illegal institutions, against organizations that we know the way they operate in this country… When [the situation] relaxes, when people stop seeing us and stop seeing Ayotzinapa as the victims that we are, in that moment we’ll lower our guard … We’ll go back to our classrooms…and what guarantees that they won’t do something to us? What guarantees that we’ll be safe?[xxiii]
Nothing does. The government will not stop until it silences its critics and removes all obstacles. This is why rural communities in the south and center of Mexico cannot remain isolated. They must ally themselves with other productive sectors that carry greater weight and sway within the market economy. Specifically, those with the capacity to halt the production of profits––the Holy Grail of the capitalist system. The students and parents of the disappeared have begun to understand this. In a recent letter published in the newspaper La Jornada, in commemoration of the Cuban Revolution, the Ayotzinapa movement wrote:
“It has become clear to us that this oppressive neoliberal government will not investigate our case because they are covering up for high-level officials who are implicated in the disappearance of the 43. For this reason, the people’s struggle is crucial in order to force them to resolve this and other concrete demands…
“It is crucial that we continue spurring on the creation of a greater cross-sectional, anti-capitalist movement that marches alongside workers in the country and in the city, elevates the forms of struggle, rises to a new alliance of forces, and builds a new country.”
—La Jornada, “Escucha mi voz 43” (July 27, 2017)
In 2015, on their journey through the U.S., the pro-Ayotzinapa caravans met with various organizations, among them striking agricultural workers, unions, and parents of black victims of police brutality. In Mexico, they received support from the telephone workers unions, the teachers’ union, and electricians from the center and south of the country. Today, if a nationwide strike of telephone workers also involved making all phone calls related to the September 26 attacks public, the case might be solved in no time. Not long ago, in the aftermath of the student massacre of 1968 and during the height of Luis Echeverría’s “dirty war” of the 1970s, important workers’ struggles such as the “Union Insurgency” became a determining factor in ending the seventy-year-old “perfect dictatorship.”
Mexico’s fate is inextricably tied to that of the U.S. Ongoing foreign investment keeps generating new working-class sectors at a rapid pace, workers that are part and parcel of globalized production, in assembly lines that extend across borders. These new sectors have already begun to assert their aspirations by way of union movements along the northern border.[xxiv] Meanwhile, mass migration to the U.S. has created deep bonds between rural communities in Mexico and an immigrant labor sector that already plays a significant role in the world’s most important economy, and which has led successful union organizing drives in recent years.[xxv]
Joint struggles for better living conditions on both sides of the border would help break through the poison of current mainstream U.S. politics. This requires a North American proletariat, and a declassed intelligentsia, that reencounters its own history, its fighting spirit, and the desire for justice that pushed Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and John Brown to take the side of the slaves. One that is inspired by the courage of the Freedom Riders and the martyrs of Haymarket in Chicago. One that transcends, discards, and lays bare the emptiness of this illusion of freedom. One that ceases to succumb to the shortsightedness of the current hegemonic elite, whose desolate pettiness is expressed in Louis XV’s somber dictum: “Après moi le déluge” (After me, the flood).
From Ferguson, Missouri and Charlottesville, Virginia to Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, a new Dark Age of obscurantism threatens to riddle with bullets the central legacy of the Enlightenment based on the equality of all human beings––the ideals of Rousseau, Babeuf, and so many others. It also seeks to bury the experiences of those generations that attempted to begin a new phase in society.
In our contemporary paradigm––in which the sanctity of private property awakens the darkest passions of the wealthy classes and castes; in a country with a poverty level of 53 percent and the continent’s lowest minimum wage; with a peasant class that is openly being wiped out, subject to the bloody despotism and extortion of a parasitic layer of capos; and with a state machinery that is the backbone of a neocolonial system of exploitation––the vindication of the human raison d’être is a battle for the fundamental reordering of society.
A century after the October Revolution changed the face of the earth, the classrooms of Ayotzinapa are painted with effigies of Marx and Lenin, portraits that murmur echoes from an era when the productive and oppressed sectors of society were buoyed up on the shoulders of giants to see beyond an ocean of sadness and tragedy. The fate of the normalista students marks, in many ways, the dilemma of a nation. One in which the lives of new generations unfold and disappear like an afterthought, or one in which the marks they leave behind become fuel for the motor of history.
The online Windows XP simulator runs in a web browser and its operation imitates the operating system. You can use it to prank someone.