A reflection on the events of October 2nd, 1968, and September 26th, 2014. These two notorious dates represent both the worst and the best of Mexican society in that, although they highlight the dark and oppressive nature of the Mexican State, they also show the tenacity and ability of Mexican civil society to organise and resist.
A crime against humanity such as this one challenges both the State and society as a whole. It is an open wound that has not healed and that damages the country as a whole. For it to heal, the archives must be fully opened, the investigation must continue and justice must be done. Nine years later, the parents of the young people who disappeared in Iguala are our great civic heroes. Their tenacity, commitment and dignity are an example to follow.
The most accurate x-ray of what happened on the night of Iguala is the one elaborated by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) in its sixth and last report. The work is a documented log of impunity in Mexico, which seems to have as its central axis the famous story by Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness, in which the old sailor Marlow, on his voyage through the Congo colonized by the Belgians, exclaims: “I hate, I abhor and I cannot stand lies […]. In lies there are stains of death, an aroma of mortality.”
“In psychology there is a thing called the internalization of damages. A harm that has occurred socially becomes internalized. Parents ask themselves if they were not to blame. The five of us sat in on those conversations; we had to let ourselves be touched by their stories in order to understand what was happening to them. Out of that came invisible things that are defining.”
An educational tradition committed to the underclasses, normal schools ike Ayotzinapa and the student teachers graduating from them have long served peasant and indigenous communities across the Mexican countryside. But the State, has long considered them a threat.
