I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us

10. I have explored this analysis in “Without Terror, There Is No Business,” NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2016, pp. 135–138, and “Las economías del terror,” in Jorge Regalado, ed., Pensamiento crítico, cosmovisiones, y epistemol

Those officials, including the lawyers, detectives, and politicians, have been torturing—literally, torturing—the families of the disappeared daily from September 27, 2014, to the present day. E

While the police use guns, patrol vehicles, roads, radios, mobile phones, and other tools to disappear people, the legal administrators of forced disappearance employ computers, the mass media, government office space, public funds, laboratories, maps, graphs, texts and all manner of legal documents to do the same

Forced disappearances have two stages. The material stage occurs when police, soldiers, or armed actors physically abduct someone, as the police did with the 43 students, and take them away to an undisclosed destination. The legal-administrative stage occurs when government officials create a false narrative, and then perpetrate new atrocities to support it.

Two weeks before the second anniversary of the attacks against the students, President Enrique Peña Nieto left no doubt as to the role of the highest levels of the federal government in the forced disappearances of the 43 students. On September 14, 2016,

Impunity is not the result of “corruption” or “incompetence” or a “lack of resources.” Impunity is an exquisitely crafted function of the judicial system; it is in fact the defining feature of the judicial system. Or, as I once heard writer Francisco Goldman say at a journalism conference in Guadalajara: “Impunity is the freedom of expression of the killers.”

Perhaps they have not told you, but it has been all of you, the families and compañeros of the murdered and disappeared students, who have been able, with the strength of your pain, with this pain turned into a dignified, noble rage, to lead many people in Mexico and the world to awaken, to question, to debate. For this we thank you.”

Recall that Aguirre was first appointed interim governor after Rubén Figueroa was forced to resign following the masscare of Aguas Blancas: the cyclical patterns of horror repeat under the reign of impunity.)

They let us into the meeting, señores, and they make us, the parents, go through a metal detector. How is it possible that they make us go through a metal detector? Make your system, your police, your killers go through the metal detector. What can we do to him? No, I didn’t just take it, señores, not this time, I didn’t take it. I don’t know if that dog will have me killed. Let him do it. Here I am. But give me back my son. Nothing else. And the other forty-two students. That is all I ask.

This government doesn’t just hurt you as a father or mother, it hurts your whole family, all your children.