On September 26, 2014, life changed radically for today teacher Ulises Martínez Juárez. Born in Tixtla, Guerrero, son of a community policeman, he was then a student at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa. The night of Iguala marked him forever. His 43 disappeared classmates ache in the deepest part of his heart.
That September 26, he recalls, was Friday. Many compañeros were no longer there. The outsiders had been told to go home because it was hoped to make a small saving in rations. The Federation of Socialist Peasant Students of Mexico (FECSM) was going to arrive. “We were preparing for the October 2 march. Since I am from here, I stayed. I was preparing for a professional internship and to make the nametags..
“It was nighttime, when compañeros from the committee came to knock on the door to tell us there was an emergency and to summon us to the basketball court. I went out and met several colleagues and asked them what was going on. They told me that the first group was in Iguala and had been shot at. There was talk of a dead compañero: Aldo Gutiérrez.
“I went out with a T-shirt. We had a small meeting on the field and agreed to go help them. We had two Urbans, with a capacity for 15 or 20 people. We were so eager to support them and so helpless that we were about 30 people in each one. I got up front. There were four of us.
“It was a mess. We didn’t really know what was going on. I would call and some people wouldn’t answer. They had said there were dead, wounded, and detained. I told them: if the kids are detained we are going to free them. We begged for the kids not to die. We had already had several deaths. The events of 2011, of 2014 were hurting us.
“The trip to Iguala was a bit heavy. It looked like terror. There was lightning. A downpour was coming. It was 9 or 9:30, and we were alone on the road. We knew what the political and crime situation was like in Iguala.
At the crossroads to Huitzuco we found a red three-ton pickup truck, across the road. The driver of the Urban stopped for a while. On the right side there were armed people. A policeman warned us: ‘Stop, you sons of …’, and pointed at us. I said to myself ‘this is it.’ In seconds, my whole family and my whole life came to me. We said to him: ‘follow us.’ He maneuvered and we passed. He accelerated.
“More kids from the school were planning to go. I called them and told them: they are narcos, don’t come. We thought at the time that it was to prevent more reinforcements from coming in. With time we realized that it was to prevent the buses from leaving.
“We arrived in Iguala between 10 and 10:30. There was a municipal police checkpoint. We found a bus shot at, with broken windows and flat tires. We saw no one. We followed. We were going hard. On the right side we saw several kids with shaved heads. We went around to a roundabout to pick them up. We went back to the bus, but they were gone. They ran and the municipal police tried to run them over. They went into the Pajaritos neighborhood.
“We didn’t know where the attacks had occurred. We asked. We asked a cab driver: ‘take us there, we’ll pay you’. He replied, ‘no, I’m not allowed to go there’. We went into the center and saw some patrol cars with their lights on. Our anger and rage were very high. It was beginning to spark. We were in the very center of Iguala’s Zócalo.
“A woman told us: ‘Boys, go straight ahead, your comrades are there, they are in bad shape. We took all of Juan N. Alvarez until we reached the buses. They had put rocks in the bushings. There were journalists, teachers, normalistas. I said, ‘no manches‘ (slang for this can’t be real, or you have to be kidding) and got on the bus. There was blood, shirts, perforated seats. I took several photos. The kids were crying. I tried to comfort them. Don’t get upset,’ we told them.
“We were waiting for the authorities to arrive, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the experts, to carry out the procedures. No one arrived. On the opposite. It got dark and it started to rain a little harder. It was about 11:30 and we could hear the gunshots. When it was 12 o’clock we were very few. We agreed to hold the press conference there and leave.
“In the Urban where I was riding, Édgar Andrés Vargas also arrived. We were at Juan N. Alvarez. The students started the press conference. ‘Hold on,’ I said to Edgar, ‘I’m going to listen.’ I took out my cell phone. I took a picture of where Aldo had fallen. There was a pool of blood curdling. Two cars were coming slowly and they stopped. A few people got out.
One got down and the other stood still. They fired a volley into the air. People began to scream. A reporter bumped into me. I fell with her. That saved my life, because the next shots were at the press conference.
“Everyone stampeded as best they could. They jumped over fences, got under cars, hid. I crawled and got on the second tire of the first bus. I held on. I heard: An ambulance, an ambulance. A bullet shattered comrade Edgar’s jaw, his mouth, his lips. I took two pictures of him, just as he was. It was six minutes of shooting.
“We carried him. The pain made him faint. We encouraged him: ‘don’t die, Oaxacan, don’t go’. With fear, we started to run. A lady told us: ‘boys, there is the Cristina hospital, get in because if you don’t they will kill you.’ There were two nurses and they didn’t want to open the door until we forced our way in. “In the normal we didn’t believe in the government. We were simply fighting for equality. But we never thought it was capable of this. The poor are incriminated and the delinquents are rewarded. It’s very sad.”
The night of Iguala is an open wound. Without truth, justice or reparation for the damage, Ulises carries the enormous pain of the aggression he experienced, but also of not knowing where his classmates are. His gratitude towards his school remains intact. “In Ayotzinapa,” he concludes, “they taught us to think and to awaken our conscience.”
Original text by Luis Hernández Navarro in La Jornada published on September 25th, 2024.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.