After more than 100 police, soldiers and hitmen collaborated to attack Ayotzinapa students in Iguala, Guerrero on the night of September 26-27, 2014, wounding scores, killing 6 people and forcibly disappearing 43 Ayotzinapa students, two successive administrations have promised and failed to find the disappeared and document the full truth of what happened that night in Iguala. While the brazen cover-up of the Peña Nieto PRI administration (2012-2018) has been exhaustively documented, the current López Obrador administration’s (2018-2024) sabotage of the investigation is still ongoing and more difficult to parse. John will delve into the mechanics of building impunity in the case of the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, and its implications for other authoritarian regimes worldwide.
John Gibler, is a journalist and author who lives and writes in Mexico. He is the author of I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights, 2017), To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (City Lights, 2011), and Torn from the World: A Guerrilla’s Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico (City Lights, 2018), among other books. In addition to his continued reporting on the Ayotzinapa investigation, he has reported on the murder of activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras and the “regime of exception” in El Salvador.
