Three Years After Ayotzinapa Students Disappeared, New Platform Reveals Cracks in Govt’s Story Ryan Devereaux - The Intercept
go to original September 11, 2017

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Update: Mexican Police Fire at Bus Supporting Missing Ayotzinapa Students (teleSUR)

The Mexican government’s story goes like this: On the night of September 26, 2014, roughly 100 students from Ayotzinapa, a rural teaching college, clashed with municipal police in the city of Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero. Rocks were thrown, shots were fired, and 43 students were snatched up by the authorities and handed over to a local drug gang. The students were then driven to a garbage dump where they were murdered, burned to ash, and tossed into a river, never to be seen again. This, Mexico’s attorney general once said, was “the historical truth.”

Horrific as it sounds, this “truth” is a hollow and misleading narrative, which has been debunked and exploded by independent inquiries. With the third anniversary of the tragedy approaching, a new project by an international team of investigators has taken the most damning of those inquiries and visualized them, offering a means of seeing the night of September 26 for what it truly was: a coordinated, lethal assault on the students involving Mexican security forces at every level, and grave violations of international law.

The interactive platform, constructed by the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and shared with The Intercept in advance of its public release, pulls from a voluminous body of investigations into the crime. In addition to utilizing the most credible evidence available to illustrate how the night unfolded, the platform highlights inconsistencies in the government’s account of the events and tracks individual actors throughout the ordeal.

A screenshot from the Forensic Architecture platform reconstructs the attack on Mexican college students in the city of Iguala. Circles of red indicate crime scenes, colored lines show communications between Mexican security forces. (Forensic Architecture)

For instance, users can follow the trail of a military intelligence agent whose movements and communications throughout the night indicate that he looked on for nearly an hour as Ayotzinapa students were attacked and disappeared, providing updates to his superiors at a nearby Infantry Battalion in real time. The military agent’s position, visualized in the platform, contradicts the version of events he repeatedly described in testimony to federal prosecutors.

... Beginning this week and running through January 2018, the platform will be showcased at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, in addition to living online.

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