
Mexico’s Missing Forty-Three: One Year, Many Lies, and a Theory - drainge
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/mexicos-missing-forty-three-one-year-many-lies-and-a-theory-that-might-make-sense
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dethstar
About the sixth bus, apparently the sicarios realized it wasn't who they were
looking for and shouted: "we fucked up", and the leader replied: "leave no
witness alive"

edit: I think it's kind of sad that there's people capable of ending other
people's lives just like that, with no remorse, no second thought about it.
With that said, many did survive.

edit 2: after re-reading the source I posted below I noticed that I had missed
something, he ordered them to go away after shooting (I'm guessing to the
sky?). Still, hearing someone order your death, can't imagine how scary that'd
be.

~~~
derrickdirge
>About the sixth bus, apparently the sicarios realized it wasn't who they were
looking for and shouted: "we fucked up", and the leader replied: "leave no
witness alive"

What's the source for this?

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dethstar
I don't have a source in English, sorry

[http://www.milenio.com/estados/Jorge_evita_que_mataran_a_mas...](http://www.milenio.com/estados/Jorge_evita_que_mataran_a_mas_avispones_0_596940675.html)

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Kiro
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre#A...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre#Alleged_survivor.27s_story)

One of the most horrific things I've ever read.

~~~
mtdewcmu
I'm not sure I take the word of this "alleged survivor." It sounds
suspiciously made-up.

Ex.: He seems to have witnessed events that happened simultaneously in
different locations, while at the same time being one of the victims himself.
Also, he seems to have been able to intuit various people's intentions and
reactions as if he could read their minds.

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armandososa
> Now the evidence itself suggested at least a plausible hypothesis: the
> attacks were triggered when a bus used to transport heroin was commandeered
> by the students, and that the motive—because the municipal police and others
> involved in the attacks didn’t know which of the commandeered buses had the
> drugs aboard, or perhaps had been specially outfitted to smuggle drugs
> without detection

That's a very plausible theory. I wonder how much drugs could a bust like that
carry.

~~~
gadders
It sounds like a movie plot, not real life.

~~~
A010
Like ... Narcos?

I don't know, isn't that based on true story?

~~~
betolink
Mexico is where the new Narcos live and operate since the fall of the
Colombian cartels so in a sense yes but worse.

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betolink
As a side note, you can see how corrupt the Mexican State is when the police
knew there were students in those buses but didn't care about the consequences
of their actions.

~~~
_pmf_
> but didn't care about the consequences of their actions

Corruption is not black or white. The choice for the police officers is not
"take the money or leave it", but "take the money or have your wife and
daughters raped and/or killed and thrown in a landfill".

~~~
Lawtonfogle
_Plata o plomo._

Silver or lead.

Take the bribe, becoming dirty with us and gaining benefit for aiding us, or
suffer greatly.

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kylebrown
A point of controversy is whether or not the 43 students were incinerated. The
indedentent experts (GIEI) report insist that it was impossible:

> _Dr. José Luis Torero, an internationally recognized fire-investigation
> expert, was hired by the GIEI to conduct an independent examination into the
> incineration scenario. Torero, a Peruvian who participated in the forensic
> investigations of the World Trade Center attacks, has a Ph.D. from the
> University of California, Berkeley, and was previously a professor of fire
> security at the University of Edinburgh. He currently heads the School of
> Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia. The
> incineration of forty-three bodies in an open-air terrain like that of the
> Cocula dump, Torero concluded, would have required some thirty-three tons of
> wood or fourteen tons of pneumatic tires, along with the same amount of
> diesel fuel; the fire would have had to burn for sixty hours, not the twelve
> that the P.G.R. claimed it had, based on the confessions of captured
> Guerreros Unidos sicarios. The smoke from such a fire would have risen
> nearly a thousand feet into the sky and would have been visible for miles
> around; no such pillar of smoke was spotted, or even captured by satellite
> imagery._

The pro-government media is pushing back that its just one scientist's
opinion, which is at odds with the opinion of scientists at UNAM (national
university of mexico) who participated in the government investigation and
concluded that the missing students _were_ incinerated.

~~~
crpatino
That sounds eerily reminiscent of the Climate Change Denialist camp: bribe
some unscrupulous scientist to push whatever narrative you want people to
believe, then use the media to frame the conflict as a matter of opinion.

If the facts says that burning 43 bodies would require more fuel than what
could be moved in secret to the place, and would leave unmistakable traces
that are simply missing, that's what the facts say. Period. The UNAM scientist
can claim that the Earth is flat... it is not as if their paycheck don't
ultimately come from the same people that is trying very hard to cover up the
whole affair.

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Aldo_MX
I'll be honest here, the 43 students is a tragedy that got, unfortunately,
badly politicized and should not be taken seriously anymore.

The official demand by the people behind that political movement is "we want
them back alive", but since when a government has been able to bring dead
people back to life?

The real issue behind this tragedy is that drug dealers are infiltrated in the
government and military forces, and their influence was demonstrated when they
"got rid" of those 43 students when the students stole a bus with a cargo of
drugs.

The demand behind the movement should be to remove any criminal influence from
the government and the military forces, not to bring back to life those 43
students. They're not asking for something that will benefit us as a country,
they're asking for something that will never happen, even under the best
possible circumstances.

~~~
edgarvaldes
They deny the fact that the students are actually dead.

~~~
crpatino
Probably wishful thinking... :(

------
jstalin
More victims of the war on drugs...

~~~
billiam
This isn't really about the war on drugs, but about the tradition in Mexico,
not uniquely more than most countries, that literally every state organ is
involved in criminal activity, and is in many ways indistinguishable from the
crime cartels. It varies a lot across the country, but this has been true for
a lot of Mexico's history. It may look crazy to us, but the political
establishment has always been a part of whatever makes money in Mexico; it
just happens to be drugs these days.

The sad part is how cheaply the lives of these young people, including the
future school teachers of this part of Mexico, were thrown away. In a podunk
place like Iguala, where literally every state and local was on the payroll
with the cartels, the apparent desperation at having a drug-carrying bus
discovered galvanized not just the police, not just the 27th Battalion, but
EVERYBODY, to slaughter anybody they could find on a bus. They appear to have
been more organized about this mass murder than they were about anything else
in their sorry careers "protecting" the people of Mexico.

Every time I feel disgusted about the state of politics in the United States,
I should remind myself of what Churchill said about our system: it's the
worst, except for all the others.

~~~
AJ007
Often a feeling that (insert first world country) is absolutely terrible is
cured by a visit to any third world or developing country. What you are
describing is hardly unique to Mexico.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
Don't really follow.

It is like telling a friend who just got a great job that they shouldn't be
happy because there are other people who won the lottery or had far greater
success stories. (I did reverse it from negatives to positives.)

~~~
kbenson
Make sure to reverse all applicable portions of the argument, or it won't make
sense (and even then it's not necessary that the reverse be true for the
argument to be true).

It's more akin to a friend who has a terrible job spending a few days working
at a good job and realizing their job is terrible (to keep it reversed), or
like a friend that has a good job but thinks it's terrible spending a few days
actually working a terrible job and realizing how good theirs is (to keep the
argument the same as AJ007 presented).

~~~
Lawtonfogle
No, because the original view was still of something bad (corrupt first world
governments). They aren't as bad as something else (corrupt second/third world
governments), but they aren't good.

So using jobs, it is like having a job where you have to often pull 60 hours
weeks and then having to spend a few days helping a friend pulling 80 hour
weeks (with same compensation). Even then, the 60 hour weeks being the norm is
a bad thing and saying that someone shouldn't feel bad about it doesn't make
sense.

The switch was from bad/worse to good/better.

~~~
kbenson
It's all about relative experience. Your 60 hour a week job may not be good,
but you may be able to see and appreciate the parts that aren't as bad as what
you've now seen, and even a great job may not look as good after you've
experienced the perfect job.

And to be clear, I don't think the cure for thinking that "(insert first world
country) is absolutely terrible" is now good, just that it's relatively better
than the initial assessment.

To get back to your original response, it's like telling your happy friend
they shouldn't be absolutely content because yes, there are people out there
that are doing better financially (assuming you are willing to equate
financial success to happiness). It won't make them happier, but it will make
their outlook more realistic (which isn't always a good thing). But again,
reversing the statement like that doesn't preserve it's logical attributes.
e.g. If A implies B, you can't infer that B implies A..

