A Massacre in Mexico by Anabel Hernandez

Author:Anabel Hernandez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

The Meeting with Peña Nieto

As the government insisted the case was “solved,” family members of the missing forty-three refused to continue meeting with Interior Secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong and began demanding a direct meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto. The first meeting took place on October 29, 2014 in the presidential residence of Los Pinos. By then, Attorney General Murillo Karam was ready with evidence to “clear up” the affair.

Also attending the meeting were Undersecretary of the Interior Luis Miranda Nava, legal adviser Humberto Castillejos, and head of the AIC Tomás Zerón. Conspicuously absent were Salvador Cienfuegos, the secretary of national defense, and Enrique Galindo Ochoa, the head of the federal police. As the parents and their attorneys waited outside the office before the meeting, the only representative of the forces of law and order was the national security commissioner, Monte Alejandro Rubido—and he was sidelined, standing with the families like just another spectator. Inside the office, the president and his cohort were the ones who really called the shots.

Undersecretary Miranda Nava chaired the meeting. Peña Nieto took care to write down each of the parents’ names, looking sympathetic and engaged. The families kicked off with a series of accusations directed at the Army and the federal police, claiming that they knew what was happening all through the attacks and the disappearance—accusations that neither the president nor his team would even address.

“We have reached the absolute limit of tolerance and patience, and we are asking you, our president, as a last resort, to give us an immediate answer as to where the forty-three disappeared students have gone, and how the Army pulled them out of the hospital where they brought their classmate … What is the Army’s role when it encounters young people with such high hopes of becoming professionals … ?” demanded Felipe de la Cruz, leader of the parents of the disappeared, whose son was among the survivors.

De la Cruz had himself studied at the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa. Before the attacks of September 2014, he taught classes in Acapulco. In an interview he explained to me that though his son wasn’t killed that night, he felt he’d lost him in a different way: two years later, he still has to calm the boy when he wakes up in the middle of the night, screaming from nightmares. Since he first berated Peña Nieto in the meeting, Felipe, like attorney Vidulfo Rosales, has become the target of a smear campaign.

“We see you as the representative of our nation, and believe that we are a moral nation, and as such, no matter who may fall, no matter what it takes, we demand justice. If someone had knowledge of the events and didn’t act, they are guilty, and if you didn’t act, you are just as guilty,” de la Cruz continued. “We are here today to inform you that we will give you no more than two, three days, to provide concrete answers … You have seen the anger of each parent here, the despair.

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