GUERRERO STATE, Mexico — Life in Iguala has always moved at a deliberate pace.Located in southwestern Mexico in the pacific coast state of Guerrero, the city is known for its historic, peach-colored church and for the tamarind trees that lend Iguala its nickname: "la Ciudad Tamarindera" - the Tamarind city.
Although Mexico's bustling capital of 20 million people is only a three-hour drive north, this area feels decidedly peaceful. Many people still work the fields and dinner is sometimes still alive when you buy it.To most Mexicans, however, Iguala has come to stand for something else than rural tranquility.
In late September, 43 students mysteriously disappeared from this area.
The students had traveled by bus from a teacher's college in nearby Ayotzinapa to stage a protest in Iguala where the mayor's wife was speaking.
At some point, police apparently took the students at gunpoint on the order of the city's corrupt mayor, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, who has since gone into hiding along with his wife and the city's police chief. (They caught the mayor and his wife a few weeks later.)
Two students and three bystanders were killed as police confronted the students in a shooting that strafed nearby buildings with bullets. Reportedly, police handed over the students to a local cartel, the Guerreros Unidos. The following day, the body of one student was dumped in the streets of Iguala. In a horrible statement from his murderers, the skin had been removed from his face.
As people and government security forces have combed through the area, searching for the students, multiple mass graves have been uncovered around Iguala, grisly reminders of how frighteningly routine murders have become here.People now refer to the mountains surrounding Iguala as a graveyard. But the students have still not been found.
Posted on banners, placards and graffitied on walls, the names and faces of the disappeared are now part of Mexico's visual landscape.As demand for answers has grown, the number 43 has come to stand for the tens of thousands of others who have already lost their lives in Mexico's ongoing drug wars. Most importantly, perhaps, it stands for the lack of government accountability.
Demonstrations organized by the relatives and friends of the disappeared that began here more than two months ago has spread to the capital and beyond, prompting the biggest political crisis of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency.The governor of Guerrero has been forced to resign and at least 80 people –- including more than 40 police officers –- have been arrested. But there are few signs that the nationwide protests will die down any time soon, though police have recently cracked down harder on protesters, sparking new waves of anger.
Iguala itself looks like the aftermath of a war zone. The main municipal building on a square downtown is now empty after protesters recently torched it. Caravans of vigilantes patrol the streets, wielding machetes and conducting their own searches for the missing students. Military and federal police constantly circle the town’s streets.
Two hours away from Iguala, family members of the disappeared have bunkered down at the Ayotzinapa Normal School that the missing students attended. They have turned classrooms into communal sleeping rooms and draped a banner over the school entrance, demanding justice.
In the courtyard, they have erected an impromptu memorial: 46 orange school chairs -- one for each of the missing students (including the four that have been confirmed dead.)
During my trip there recently, I watched fathers commiserate and tell stories to each other about their sons. Occasionally there would be laughs but mostly I sensed fatigue and a desire for closure. Not knowing if their children are alive or dead must be the hardest thing to experience.
Hilda Legideño Vargas 20-year-old son Jorge Tizapa Legideño, disappeared in September. I went with her to Jorge's modest home. As she sat on her son’s bed, talking about his one-year-old daughter, tears welled up in her eyes.She told me that he called her last when he was on his way to Iguala. He promised to text when he was on his way home. The text never came.
