After Ayotzinapa Chapter 1: The Missing 43

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

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4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

It has been over seven years since 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again. Their disappearance sparked mass protests, as the 43 became symbols of Mexico’s unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable. The culture of impunity is so ingrained that families often don’t go to police for help, believing they’re either corrupt or too afraid to investigate.

In a three-part investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive take us inside the investigation into the attack on the students. They have help from Omar Gómez Trejo – the man the Mexican president tapped to prosecute the crime. For more than a year, he kept audio diaries and had regular conversations with Diaz-Cortes and Doyle, giving them insight into a massive coverup by the previous Mexican administration and efforts by current investigators to piece together the details of the attack and bring to justice those responsible.

Transcript

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0:47.6	do, go to revealnews.org slash 2023. Thank you. From the Center for
1:02.8	Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Aledson. It's September 2021
1:12.0	and Omar Gomez Trail is leading crowd reporters down the slope of a steep
1:18.0	and stony ravine somewhere in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. The
1:24.1	journalist traveled more than six hours in a caravan of vehicles for a chance to
1:29.4	see this site. Despite the harsh sun overhead, the treacherous path underfoot,
1:36.4	the thorny brush and biting flies. The group is eager to visit this place. It's been
1:42.4	close to them since investigators found a collection of bone fragments here.
1:46.2	The reporters cluster around Omar and turn on their microphones. In a way,
1:58.2	all of Mexico is waiting to hear what Omar has to say. He's not a politician or
2:03.9	big-time movie star, nothing like that. Omar is a 40-something human rights lawyer
2:08.5	with a scruffy beard, clarket glasses and tattoos of his arms. He's at the
2:14.1	center of an investigation into one of the most horrific crimes in Mexico's modern
	...

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