Opinion • John Gibler • August 8, 2023 • Originally published in Spanish on July 31, 2023 at ¿A dónde van los desaparecidos? 

The government of Enrique Peña Nieto lied about the forced disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. They were not the only ones: officials from all three levels of government lied about the attacks against the students in Iguala during the long night of September 26-27, 2014. 

They lied about what happened, about who participated, about who didn’t participate, and about why it happened. They lied from day one and they lied throughout the four years that the Peña Nieto administration remained in power. They tortured detainees to produce false testimonies. They destroyed evidence. They hid evidence. They planted false evidence. And they denied the evidence they failed to destroy or hide.

The president, the governor and the mayor all lied. The Secretary of National Defense, the Attorney General, the judge of the Superior Court of Justice of Guerrero and the President of the National Human Rights Commission lied. The soldiers and the police lied. The navy, police and federal investigators who tortured detainees lied. The organized crime gunmen who themselves were tortured lied. 

They all lied and their strategy in the face of the evidence that revealed their falsehoods was always the same: repeat the lie. 

One of the mid-management administrators of the lies, former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, currently under arrest and accused of torture, obstruction of justice and forced disappearance, had the gall to call this set of lies “the historical truth.”

None of this is in doubt. 

The lies of the Peña Nieto government are, perhaps, the best documented and most discredited state lies in recent history. Much of this documentation was carried out over eight years and four months by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), operating within the precautionary measures issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and with the support of the Mexican government and the parents of the 43 disappeared students.

By 2016, when we were still stuck in the power-web of the Peña Nieto government’s lies, the GIEI had published two reports with a total of 1,030 pages dismantling those lies. That dismantling exposed a State that not only butchers the truth, but also tortures, kills, mutilates and disappears its citizens. The government withdrew its endorsement and removed the GIEI from the country. And then all the officials simply continued to lie.

We were given a valuable lesson in the art of political lying: no matter the truth, no matter the evidence, the proofs or the documentation, no matter the obvious ridiculousness of the official who insists on proclaiming that the earth is flat and the sky is green; when you are in power, all you need to do is repeat the lie over and over again without so much as blinking.

And now, after everything, after so much, after giving hope back to the families and taking it away again, yet another politician—another graduate of the political school of the Institutional Revolutionary Party—comes to show us his mastery in the art of the casual repetition of the denial of reality, of the classic “aquí no pasó nada,” “nothing happened here,” enunciated with the State’s megaphone in front of the burning building and over the cries for help.

On September 26, 2018, at a commemorative event with the families of the 43 disappeared young men then president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador pledged to investigate the attacks and the mass forced disappearance that occurred four years prior in Iguala. He said he would find the students, the truth of the events, and punish those responsible.

Recalling the October 19, 2001 murder of Digna Ochoa that López Obrador’s Mexico City government called a suicide, recalling Obrador’s silence during Felipe Calderon’s six-year term of horror, recalling his silence and distance in the days, months and years after the mass forced disappearance of the students, I did not believe him. 

But at the end of the event, many of the mothers who had been searching for their children for four years and fighting against a state committed to lies and pain, embraced me with tears in their eyes, but smiling, and told me: “At last we are going to find them, at last someone is going to listen to us.” 

And I hugged them and told them: “I hope so, at last, I hope so.”

I didn’t want to run over their hope with my mistrust and I didn’t want to lie to them either. And at that moment, between those arms, I thought: if this man lies again and covers up again, it would be an atrocity, and even if it is different from the torture and the administrative disappearance committed by the Peña Nieto government, to give these families hope only to trample on it would be so utterly vile.

And here we are once again, facing the power-web of lies, but now with another piece of our hearts torn out to make room for a new hopelessness.

New report, same barriers to justice

On Tuesday, July 25, the GIEI published its sixth report: Findings, Advances, Obstacles and Pending Tasks. The report shows—using, among other evidence, documents from Army and Navy archives and cellphone analysis with data from the case file—what we have always known from the lies and silences of the previous government: local, traffic, state, investigative, and federal police as well as organized crime gunmen all participated in the attacks; the Army knew everything at all times while the events occurred; soldiers were present in the various locations of the attacks and the forced disappearances; and they all lied for years and continue to lie, denying even the existence of their own documents.

It’s as if one were to hold out an apple and say: “This is an apple.” And then another were to step up, look at the apple with contempt and say: “No, there is no apple there.”

In the words of the GIEI’s Carlos Beristain during the presentation of their sixth report:

Beristain went on to say that the cell phone location study for the night of September 26 and 27 in Iguala shows that the entire security apparatus of the State was in the streets, that the agents of that apparatus all knew what was happening, and, of course, have known ever since. 

“The concealment of that information,” Beristain said, “has contributed not only to concealing the State’s responsibilities, but has in itself constituted a responsibility of the State in the disappearance of the students.”  

What are we talking about when we talk about lies? 

Here are just a few examples: 

• The Army denies the existence of warrantless wiretaps of Guerreros Unidos members that they had active before, during and after the disappearance of the students even though the GIEI found references to and excerpts from those wiretaps within the Army’s files 

• The Army insists that the Regional Intelligence Fusion Center (CRFI) in Iguala did not exist in 2014 even though the GIEI found numerous documents from the CRFI in Iguala about the case produced, signed, stamped and dated in 2014 

• The Army denies that soldiers from the 27th Infantry Battalion knew about the attacks and that they went out during the critical hours of the night although the GIEI found several testimonies about their presence and in its last report published an analysis of several soldiers’ and officers’ cell phones that shows not only that they did go out constantly, but that they were present at the sites of attack and forced disappearance while the events were occurring

• The Army insists that its participation in the real-time video surveillance and control center, known as C-4, in Iguala that night was only as observers. The GIEI found documents that demonstrate soldiers were the ones who operated the cameras and telephones of the C-4 before, during and after the attacks.

AMLO stands behind the armed forces

On July 26, the day after the presentation of the GIEI’s sixth and final report, Andrés Manuel López Obrador appeared at his morning press conference accompanied by two uniformed military officers: the secretaries of National Defense and the Navy. 

López Obrador did not mention either the GIEI or Ayotzinapa. He took no questions on the matter. The military did not speak during the entire conference. The message of support for the military was clear.

The next morning López Obrador did take a question about the case. “We are moving forward in the purpose of clarifying what happened to the young men of Ayotzinapa,” he said. 

“We have been making a lot of progress, a lot. About 115 suspects are under arrest, 115 suspects. And not just minor officials or people [with] little influence. No. The former attorney general is in custody. Two generals are under arrest. That should be known. Because it is not being reported. And other important public officials. There is no impunity. And action is being taken. And it is not true that the Navy and the Army are not helping.” 

The reporter interrupted him, saying that according to the GIEI, the Army and Navy are not delivering all their information.

“Yes, I respect their point of view, but I don’t share it,” responded López Obrador. “If progress has been made, it is precisely because of the collaboration of the Navy and the Army. And also because of the decision we have taken that impunity will not be allowed. Institutions are one thing and public officials or public servants are another thing. And we will not allow an institution to be stained by the bad behavior of an official.”

The following day, Friday July 28, at a press conference in Nayarit, and with the nation’s top military commanders flanking him on the stage, López Obrador went even further. 

A reporter asked the secretaries of national defense and the navy their opinion of the GIEI report’s findings. López Obrador did not let either of them answer: 

“No,” he told the reporter. “I am the supreme commander of the armed forces as well as the President of Mexico. That’s why I want to answer. Because it’s not true. It is a baseless campaign against the Mexican Army. In general, it’s not so. It is a campaign to undermine, to weaken the armed forces. If what they claim was true, there would not be two generals in jail for the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa youths.”

But the fact that two generals are in jail is completely distinct from the fact that the Army refuses to deliver and denies the existence of the documentation that the GIEI discovered. This documentation could contain information about the whereabouts of some or all of the disappeared students. 

Polarization and arrogant reason

The GIEI’s most recent report includes 316 pages of evidence and documentation of the eight years and ten months of lies. Almost half the document details the Army and Navy’s current lies, using their own documents as proof. 

And the president, like Peña Nieto or Murillo Karam before him, responds with an evasive: “it is not true that the Navy and Defense are not helping.” That’s how easy it is to lie from the crest of power. That’s how easy it is, just like the PRI supporters of the call to “just get over it” and the notion of “historical truth.”

When a politician wants to deny reality, to protect his favorites, to hide the horror exercised by the institution he leads, all he has to do is lie and repeat the lie without hesitation.

What López Obrador adds to the art of political lying is the old and reliable tactic of arrogant reason: to disqualify the person with whom he disagrees. Those who question him, those who confront him with evidence, are branded “conservatives” and “progressive good guys” who work at the service of his “adversaries” to launch “a campaign to undermine, to weaken the armed forces.”

This, of course, is said by the president who has given more power to the Army than any other. 

Santiago Aguirre, the director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center pointed this out at the press conference of the parents of the 43 missing students on July 27. 

“The Army is an institution that has more powers than before, a bigger budget than before, that is less accountable than before, and that is actively sabotaging two of this government’s main commitments in human rights: the Ayotzinapa case and revealing the truth about the dirty war,” said Aguirre. He himself has been the target of multiple espionage attacks with Pegasus, the Israeli spyware for which the Army is the main client.

But for President López Obrador, none of that exists. There is no proof, nothing is true, everything is a campaign waged by his political opponents. 

Perhaps that is why Mario González, father of the disappeared Ayotzinapa student César Manuel, when he criticizes the Army’s lies, when he criticizes López Obrador for letting them lie, when he expresses the demand of the mothers and fathers of the disappeared students to have an urgent meeting with the president, he also feels the need to clarify something, to tell the president that the families are not coming on behalf of anyone else. 

“We come out of pain,” said González. “We come because we have not found our children.”