History Keeps Me Awake at Night by Christy Edwall

Author:Christy Edwall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I copied this paragraph down in my notebook, although it seemed to have no obvious connection to the missing students. Or rather, I copied it because its connection was structural, even architectural, rather than substantive. More than anyone, I thought, he would have understood the diagrams I had drawn. In fact, this paragraph of González Rodríguez’s seemed to describe my diagram of coincidence, even though it was a description written without him ever having seen the image it translated. Nonetheless, the image of the author stunned and then startled into escape was undeniably ridiculous, as if he were a rabbit who’d dashed into the highway in the middle of the night, only to see the bright beams of trucks bearing down on him, but it was a ridiculousness he didn’t hide or cringe from, a ridiculousness which, paradoxically, he took seriously, and declared in print for all to see.

I copied too the facts he offered as evidence of a cover-up. That Cocula, where the ashes of Alexander Mora Venancio were discovered in contentious – not to say disputed – circumstances, meant ‘place of quarrels’ in Nahuatl. That leftist teachers and guerrillas occasionally joined forces with organized crime to disrupt the corrupt and incompetent local government. That in 2011, three years before the disappearances, students had held a protest in Chilpancingo by blocking the highway, and two students had died following a subsequent clash with the police, along with a man who succumbed to his injuries after the students tried to burn down the garage where he worked. I learned that, just as human traffickers were called coyotes, the spies sent out by organized crime were known as falcons. That organized crime controlled the country’s iron exports to China. That the large-scale cultivation of marijuana and opium was introduced into Guerrero by a CIA operative; that CIA agents had been recorded as being present on that fateful night in Iguala; and that the mutilation and eye-gouging of Julio César Mondragón Fontes that took place north of the Periférico Norte on the night of 26 September resembled certain covert protocols deployed in Vietnam. Most provocatively, González Rodríguez argued that there had been at least one soldier on active duty who had infiltrated the students’ circle and who had died among them: the deceptively quiescent Julio César López Patolzin, who, on the government’s poster, it was true, looked a good fifteen years older than the others.

The trial of the members of Guerreros Unidos who had been hauled up before a judge, González Rodríguez maintained, was a sham. The words of the prosecutor, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, were stirring: he was prosecutor as witness, prosecutor as chief mourner. And yet, while the government’s circumstantial evidence rested on the two black bags of ashes found at Cocula which allegedly included the remains of Alexander Mora Venancio, a researcher at the Physics Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) calculated that the cremation of all forty-three students at the Cocula rubbish dump would have required ‘33 tons of firewood or 995 tyres, which would have left behind 2.

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