A grisly crime and a possible cover-up remind Mexicans of what they most dislike about their government

EVEN the official story is shocking. In September 2014 a group of student teachers from Ayotzinapa, in the south-western state of Guerrero, decided to commandeer some buses in the nearby town of Iguala. They wanted to go to a rally in Mexico City, and it is common for students in this part of Mexico to take buses for such things. They usually return them.

Forty-three of those students disappeared, and are presumed dead. The mayor of Iguala and his wife were angry with them for having disrupted a political event, the federal government says, and ordered the local police to hand them over to a drug gang, the Guerreros Unidos. The gangsters mistook the students for members of a rival gang. They killed them, burned their bodies at a rubbish dump and tossed the remains in a river.

Or so the government insists. The truth may be worse. Under pressure from the families of the missing students, the government invited foreign experts, convened by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to investigate. The group, known by its Spanish initials GIEI, released a 608-page report on April 24th.

They found no evidence that the students had been burned at the rubbish dump at the time the official account said they had been. And they have suggested that one of the buses was perhaps being used to move heroin from Guerrero—Mexico’s main heroin-producing state—to Chicago. The students may have been killed because they inadvertently made off with millions of dollars’ worth of drugs.

Even the details on which both sides agree are confusing. On September 26th, at around 9.30pm, about 100 students left Iguala in five buses. Three of the buses came under fire from local police. The students in one of the buses were taken away by the police and have not been seen since. The other two buses, which took a different route, were also stopped. Again, the students on one were taken away and have not been seen since. The others, who had been alerted to what was happening, escaped into the darkness. The bodies of three bystanders and three students were later found. One of the students had his eyes gouged out and the skin on his face was missing.

Not the whole truth

The mayor and his wife are in custody, as are 73 municipal policemen and 50 gang members. The government’s version of events relies partly on confessions from gangsters. The GIEI alleges that 17 of the gang members were tortured, citing photographs showing their bodies increasingly battered as the interrogations progressed. The government says it is investigating this claim—but it is also sending the foreign experts packing.

The GIEI complains that the government obstructed its investigation by not allowing it to question soldiers from the battalion based in Iguala. The country’s National Human Rights Commission says it has heard from witnesses who say that federal police officers were present when students were bundled off one bus and into local patrol cars, and did not interfere. The government denies this. The GIEI asks whether the army also failed to act when it could have.

No one knows what really happened, but the whole country is speculating. Who, Mexicans ask, is the government protecting? The army and federal police, many suspect. Mexicans are even more appalled by the behaviour of local-level officials. The saga reminds them that in some parts of their country organised crime has infiltrated local politics so thoroughly that the two are hard to tell apart. It also reminds them that crimes in Mexico are rarely punished: only one in 100 leads to a conviction.

For the president, Enrique Peña Nieto, it has been a public-relations disaster. At first he seemed aloof: it took him a month to meet the victims’ families and 17 months to visit Iguala. Now many Mexicans question his willingness to confront the culture of corruption that allows violence to thrive. “The rest of his presidency will be plagued by this,” says Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister.

Mr Peña’s approval rating is a woeful 30%, in part because of allegations of sleaze. The boss of a government contractor that built the president’s wife a house was revealed in the Panama papers to have moved $100m through an offshore centre. And Iguala-like local tragedies keep happening.

Five people vanished earlier this year in the eastern state of Veracruz after their arrest by state police. Video of a suspect being tortured with a plastic bag over her head by two soldiers and a federal police officer recently went viral on social media. “Mexico is awakening,” says Viridiana Rios of the Wilson Centre, a think-tank in Washington. A bigger and more assertive middle class “is no longer prepared to put up with corruption and impunity”, she says. Congress will soon consider a package of anti-corruption bills.

Mr Peña, who has pushed through reforms of energy and telecoms, still has the capacity to surprise. Last week he admitted that the drug war wasn’t going well. He proposed legalising medical marijuana and decriminalising the possession of 28 grams or less of recreational pot. This could start to de-escalate the drug war, removing harmless offenders from Mexico’s jam-packed prisons and focusing law enforcement on the crimes that terrify ordinary citizens, like the killing of the student teachers of Ayotzinapa. But establishing the rule of law in Mexico will take years.

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