As the ruling party in Mexico of president Enrique Peña Nieto faces almost certain humiliation in national elections on 1 July, there’s little hiding the reasons why. In the six years since the last presidential vote, the country’s twin scourges of violence and corruption have exerted an even tighter grip. Visiting last week, I heard one refrain over and over: “We are at bottom now.”
The scars of dysfunction cover the landscape. Four governors of Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, currently face corruption charges. Transparency International's corruption perceptions index puts Mexico at 135th out of 180 countries. Meanwhile, in 2017 there were almost 27,000 murders in the country. And it has become one of the most dangerous places in the world to practise journalism: six journalists killed so far this year; eleven last.
Yet amidst all the evidence of a nation struggling to govern itself, one event stands out: the disappearance in September 2014 of 43 students from a teacher-training college in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, and a subsequent investigation by the Mexican authorities that not only screamed cover-up but also involved the torture of suspects – a charge that was reiterated in a United Nations report into the case released in March this year.
With too much misery to count, you could imagine Mexicans shrugging their tired shoulders. What is 43 against the 60,000 killed during the six-year war against the drug cartels waged by the former president, Felipe Calderón? Fortunately that hasn’t happened, if only because of the horror of it all: the government alleged the students were rounded up by local police and delivered to a local drugs gang that killed them and incinerated their bodies in a giant pit.
Every anniversary of their vanishing, angry protestors march noisily down the main avenue of Mexico City, even if the numbers have thinned a bit now. Revulsion has been international too. The government was eventually forced to invite in a panel of investigators and lawyers from the Organisation of American States, OAS, to try to get to the bottom of what happened.
It hasn’t been forgotten also because the Ayotzinapa 43, so named after the college they were attending, has now become a potent symbol of everything that ails Mexico – the corruption, violence, the impunity and the total breakdown of trust between the citizenry and those who govern them, all fused together now in this one open and still suppurating wound.
“We want to know what happened because the 43 are only part of the 60,000,” Frederico Martinez, a noted writer, historian and former government official, told me last week. “We have to stop this and we have to know the truth.”
Nothing about the government’s version of what happened – what it dared to call the “historic truth” – convinced. No motive for the massacre was offered. Several other irregularities were alleged: investigators and lawyers working for the families of the victims had been spied on by the government. The researchers attached to the OAS panel found themselves stonewalled by the Mexican authorities, unable to interview key witnesses, including military officers who were alleged to have been in the area at the time. Its mission thwarted, it was finally forced to leave Mexico, its work never completed.
The final indictment of the government’s handling of the case came last week when a district court took all involved by surprise, including the families of the victims, chastising the government for its investigation, calling it “neither prompt, effective, independent nor impartial”, and demanding that it start over. And this time the probe must not be led by the Justice Department, it said, but by a "truth commission" led by human rights lawyers and representatives of the victims’ families with room on it also for international forensics and human rights experts.
The court, far away in Tamaulipas state, thus said to the government exactly what most ordinary Mexicans believe: you are not to be trusted. “The court is telling the government, we need to change and we need to enforce the law and the constitution,” noted Martinez. “It is saying that we can no longer trust our own institutions of government. None of the three (political) parties have expressed that idea in that way before. So it’s a big moment and a huge change.”
The court’s three judges gave the administration 10 days to respond and start work on creating the truth commission. On Thursday, family members held a press conference here to hold its feet to the fire. “The 43 parents know perfectly well that it is the same government that has not given us an answer for four years, but it is an opportunity for the president to have a little bit of dignity and support the new commission,“ said Mario Gonzalez, one of the representatives.
That is exactly right. Peña Nieto knows his humiliations have barely begun. There is almost zero chance his chosen successor, Jose Antonio Meade, will be picked by the voters. Once out of office he may face the risk of criminal charges and prison for the assorted ethical lapses his administration is accused of. He should therefore take the court’s demands not as a rebuke but as a gift. In the very short amount of time he has left he should finally do the right thing: get the commission started and give it all the tools it needs to find out what really happened in Iguala.
