A Mexican army vehicle fixed with a sign showing the faces and names of missing teaching students in Iguala, Guerrero. (Photo by Lenin Ocampo)
A view of the Ayotzinapa Normal School campus, where images of "Che" Guevara adorn the walls. (Photo by Melissa del Pozo)
Visiting the Ayotzinapa Normal School is like entering a time warp, or landing in Communist Cuba. Portraits of Che, Marx, Lenin, and Engels adorn the interior walls, accompanied by images of the 1970s Mexican guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas. Its nearly 600 students are all male and live on the campus amid rallying slogans for a variety social causes.The school sits about 20 minutes outside the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo, at the end of a dirt road, where a stone archway welcomes visitors. On most days, the campus feels like a tiny city of teenagers and twenty-somethings, although the population now includes a jumble of relatives of the normalistas who were apparently kidnapped by the Iguala municipal police.
Students collectively decide on nearly every aspect of life, as well as their instruction at the school. "We have the power here," said one normalista who called himself Diego, a pseudonym.He isn't the only one using a different name. All of the students at the Ayotzinapa Normal School change their names once they cross the threshold of the entrance. Many take on nicknames that refer to their hometowns. The missing student Cesar Manuel González Hernández, for example, is known as "El Tlaxcaltequita," in reference to his home state of Tlaxcala."We are a school in the struggle," said a student who called himself Eduardo. He is the head of the "propaganda committee," one of nine groups that organize the students. "The one in charge here is not the teacher," he said.VICE News spent five days at the campus. In recent days, it has become a hub of planning and organizing for protests as students and relatives have taken to blocking major highways and protesting in Chilpancingo.The students, usually masking their faces, block passage to buses before boarding and requiring that passengers exit so that they can use the vehicles for their own transport.
Two normal-school students with their faces covered during a Friday blockade of the highway connecting Mexico City to Chilpancingo. (Photo by Melissa del Pozo)
A clearer picture of what happened that night in Iguala has emerged, pointing to a string of confrontations that in many ways reflect the complicated web of political and social conflicts that have been stewing in Guerrero for years.According to interviews with survivors of the attacks in Iguala, the students had just been protesting outside an event featuring the Iguala mayor's wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda. The group of normalistas had also been in Iguala to solicit funds for supplies for their school. In order to return to Ayotzinapa, the students stopped and temporarily hijacked three commuter buses — a standard practice for normalista students that they say reflects their ideals of social struggle.The students, usually masking their faces, block passage to buses before boarding and requiring that passengers exit so that they can use the vehicles for their own transport. They argue the government gives the normal schools scarce resources, and that commercial buses — as well as delivery trucks linked to large food companies, which the normalistas also hijack and in many cases sack for goods — represent the corrupting power of business interests in Mexico.
One of the pits used to bury burned bodies believed to be among the missing normal school students, outside Iguala, Guerrero. (Photo by Alasdair Baverstock)
A VICE News reporter on Monday gained access to several of the six grave sites where the missing normalistas were likely buried.The site sits about 30 minutes by car outside the center of Iguala, and requires another half-hour hike to reach from a roadside. The graves were slimy with grease, or what appeared to be sticky fat. The area gave off a disgusting stench of burnt flesh.Authorities said the bodies that have been recovered so far have all been burned. Forensics investigators from Argentina have joined the effort to exhume and identify the victims."This is the favorite cemetery of the killers," Virgilio Rodríguez, a resident of the nearest village to the site, Pueblo Viejo, told VICE News.