Iguala— Ulises Martínez is not comfortable moving around Iguala, the city where 43 of his classmates from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College disappeared 10 years ago.
That night, a hundred students had just boarded five buses in Iguala when they were attacked by police linked to organised crime. Almost half of them were detained at different points and then disappeared. In addition, there were six dead and more than 40 injured.
The violence continued against those who remained and against thirty students who came to support them, like Martínez, with several shootings at different times that turned the city in the state of Guerrero into hell.
Martínez was 20 years old that night, a third-grade student at Ayotzinapa and knew how to act in clashes with the police.
He agreed to return to the places where he was on the night of September 26, 2014, committed to seeing justice done for a crime that remains unsolved.
This is his account of the facts.
“When I took the photo of the pool of blood and turned around… some individuals dressed in black got out, one of them knelt down, first he fired a burst into the air and then they started shooting” Ulises Martínez Former student of the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School
9:30 at night
They start knocking on the dormitory doors because the classmates who went to Iguala are having problems. Martínez grabs his cell phone and a shirt to cover his face and gets into one of the two vans that leave for that city, 120 kilometers north of the school.
10:00 at night
The road is empty. At a crossroads, about 15 kilometers from Iguala, there is a pickup truck with armed men in it. “When we saw that, we already knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”
The student driving nervously asks what to do. Martinez hears them loading cartridges. They aim at them. “We’re left here,” he thinks. “Why did I come?”
The driver accelerates and passes the checkpoint. No one can explain why they are not shot. “I called the police and told them ‘don’t come… There are drug dealers’.”
Cell phones are on fire between colleagues asking for help and those who want to know what is happening.
10:20 at night
As they pass under the bridge next to the Palace of Justice, at the entrance to Iguala, they see an empty bus: “Wrecked, flat tires, open trunks, broken windows.” They see that it is one of the ones their companions took, but they do not stop.
The van continues at full speed towards the bus terminal. They pass five or six first-year students running in the same direction. They recognize them by their shaved heads. When they turn around to pick them up, they have disappeared.
Days later, they were told that they fled into the mountains because a patrol car was approaching. They were on a bus that stopped near the one they saw destroyed and were forcibly taken off by federal police. That was the so-called fifth bus that was never located and that, according to the Truth Commission, they took by mistake without knowing that it could be carrying drugs or money.
The videos from the security cameras at the Palace of Justice never appeared, but investigators confirmed the involvement of federal agents and that, a few meters from that bridge, there was a soldier on a motorcycle taking photos. It was at this location that a group of the missing students were arrested.
10:30 at night
They arrive at the terminal. They ask for the place that their classmates gave them as a reference to where they are. The taxi drivers say that they are not allowed to go there. Since they already know that there are students detained, they consider the possibility of capturing police officers to exchange them, but they immediately discard the idea due to the level of violence they perceive.
11:00 at night
After searching the city centre, they found three more buses riddled with bullets. Some of their companions were there, crying. Others had been taken away by the police. “They couldn’t understand what had happened.”
Martínez gets on one of the buses. “There were pools of blood, shirts, seats riddled with bullet holes, it looked really bad. We were waiting for an authority but no one came.”
Confusion reigns. They do not know how many people have been arrested, nor where many of their colleagues are. News is coming in of new shootings in another part of the city, where three people with no connection to the students have died.
They want to protect the place “so that they don’t take the buses or the shells” and so that there is evidence. They decide to call local journalists.
12:30 a.m. on September 27
While they were talking to the press, Martínez separated from the group to take a photo of the place where a student was hit in the head. He had been taken to the hospital before he arrived, believed to be dead, but survived. He remained in a coma.
A red pickup truck approaches slowly. “When I took a photo of the pool of blood and turned around… some individuals dressed in black got out, one of them knelt down, first he fired a burst into the air and then they started shooting” at students and journalists who dispersed in the panic.
“I was in shock. A reporter bumped into me and we fell to the ground.” Martínez hides behind a wheel. “Run.” One man runs away in the opposite direction to the others.
When the shooting stops, he calls for an ambulance for a man with a wound in his jaw. “Blood was running out.” They carry him and a woman tells them there is a hospital nearby: “Get in there… they are going to kill you.”
Two students are left dead at the scene, although they have not yet realized it.
01:00 in the morning
A group of students enter the clinic, although the nurses did not want them to, they sit the injured man down and turn off the lights.
Martínez and another companion go up to the roof to see if they are being followed. He calls his father to say goodbye “in case he doesn’t come back.”
Two army trucks arrive. Martínez’s friend wants to jump off the roof when he sees the soldiers entering. Martínez stops him and tells him that the worst that can happen to them is that they will be taken to the barracks. His friend, originally from Iguala, contradicts him. He tells him that soldiers, drug dealers and police “are the same” and that they are going to kill them.
The soldiers gather all the students downstairs and force them to put their cell phones on the table. If they ring, they have to put them on speakerphone and say they are fine without saying where.
The soldiers receive a call. They take out a notebook. They are told that the police will come for them and that they should “write down their real name because, if not, they will never find them.”
Martinez panics.
01:15 in the morning
The army leaves before the police arrive and everyone flees. Martínez and other comrades convince a taxi driver to take the wounded man to the General Hospital and then they run until someone from a nearby house opens a door for them. There are about 30 students hiding there.
“I went between a water tank and a sink. I found a wooden rosary and put it on.”
A woman takes Martinez and five others to a second home. No one sleeps.
05:00 in the morning
Students begin to arrive at the Palace of Justice to have their statements taken. A group goes out to look for those who are missing. There is no trace of them.
Many cell phones receive a photograph: that of the corpse of Julio César Mondragón, the one who had fled in the opposite direction after the press conference. His face has been torn off.
09:00 in the morning
Martínez is sent to the General Hospital to care for the sick. He does not move from there for four days, sleeping on a piece of cardboard, terrified because a patrol car was “protecting” him. No one is aware of what has happened.
The night of terror was over. “The horror story was about to begin,” he says 10 years later.
#AYOTZINAPA #CASE #voice #survivor
