DOCUMENTS / RESOURCES
Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI)
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) was created in November 2014 through an agreement between the IACHR, the Mexican State, and representatives of the disappeared students in Ayotzinapa. This agreement also established the main activities to be carried out by the GIEI: to draw up plans for searching for the disappeared persons alive; technical analysis of the lines of investigation to determine criminal liabilities; and technical analysis of the Plan for Integral Attention to the Victims (Plan de Atención Integral a las Víctimas) of the events of September 26 and 27, 2014.
The GIEI is comprised of Carlos Martín Beristain, Angela Buitrago, Francisco Cox Vial, Claudia Paz y Paz and Alejandro Valencia Villa.
Ayotzinapa Report I
September 6, 2015
Ayotzinapa Report II
April 24, 2016
Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)
The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) carried out the tasks of documentation and recovery of biological and non-biological evidence in the municipal trash dump in the town of Cocula, Guerrero. Over 18 months of collection and multidisciplinary analysis of the physical evidence from the Cocula landfill revealed that no scientific evidence was found to support the supposed incineration of the 43 students on the night of September 26-27, 2014 in that location, disputing the "historic truth" of the Mexican government.
This conclusion was presented by the EAAF at their press conference on February 9, 2016, and in the following comprehensive report (click image to view pdf).
Since 1984, the EAAF has accompanied families of victims of enforced disappearance around the world in the search, identification, and restitution of the remains of their loved ones, placing science at the service of truth and justice. The EAAF has been nominated for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Ayotzinapa Case: A Cartography Of Violence
Project by Forensic Architecture commissioned by and undertaken in collaboration with the Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense (EAAF), Centro de Derechos Humanos Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez (Centro Prodh) and University Museum for Contemporary Art (MUAC) for the families of the 43 disappeared, the wounded and killed students.
An interactive cartographic platform visualizes, for the first time, the attacks on the night of 26-27 September 2014 that led to the disappearance of the 43 students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa in the town of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.
Using interactive maps and 3D reconstructions, the platforms reveals:
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The progression, escalation and geographic spread of the violence during the attacks
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The level of coordination and collusion between state agencies and organized crime
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The extent of the disruption and distortion of evidence by state agencies
The Ayotzinapa Case: A Map of Violence / El Caso De Ayotzinapa Una Cartografía De La Violencia
The Enforced Disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43: The Palacio de Justicia
Centro Prodh
Since its foundation by the Jesuits in 1988, the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (Center Prodh) has defended and promoted respect for human rights in Mexico with a mission to build a more just, equitable, and democratic society that fully respects human dignity. Center Prodh’s day-to-day work includes the following programs of action:
Democratic Justice:
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Justice for gross human rights violations: combat impunity and promote victims’ access to truth and justice for gross human rights violations of the past (committed during Mexico’s dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s) and present, including enforced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and torture.
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Citizen security and human rights: defend the right to physical and psychological integrity and promote changes to Mexico’s public security policies. They advocate for the demilitarization of public security tasks and focus on issues including sexual torture of women and the disproportionate impact of counterproductive security policies on vulnerable groups.
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Criminal justice: promote change in the practices and norms of the criminal justice system, seeking to guarantee fair, efficient, and effective criminal investigations and trials that comply with international standards.
Land Justice:
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Strengthen communities’ defense of their land rights, through legal actions, trainings, dissemination of information, advocacy, and international activism. with a focus on indigenous communities whose land is threatened by the illegal imposition of so-called mega-development projects.
Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña Tlachinollan
The Tlachinollan Center was founded in 1994 in response to repeated human rights violations and forced disappearances in the La Montaña region, principally against indigenous communities.
Based in Tlapa de Comonfort, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, their mission is to promote and defend the rights of the Nauas, Na savi (Mixtecos), Me' Phaa (Tlapanecos) and Amuzgo indigenous peoples, as well as other poor communities, in their struggle for justice and full respect of their human rights.
A Massacre in Mexico
By Anabel Hernández
The definitive account of the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43.
Investigative reporter Anabel Hernández reconstructs the events of September 26-27, 2014 and its aftermath, giving us the most complete picture available. Her sources are unparalleled. In researching this book, she secured access to internal government documents that have not been made public and to surveillance footage the government has tried to hide and destroy. Hernández demolishes the Mexican state’s official version of events, which the Peña Nieto government cynically dubbed the “historic truth.” As her research shows, state officials at all levels, from police and prosecutors to the upper echelons of government, conspired to put together a fake case, concealing and manipulating evidence, and arresting and torturing dozens of “suspects,” procuring forced confessions to back up the official lie. By following the role of the various Mexican state agencies through the events in such remarkable detail, A Massacre in Mexico shows with exacting precision precisely who is responsible for this monumental crime and who needs to be held accountable.
Faces Of The Disappeared
By Tryno Maldonado
Award-winning Mexican author Tryno Maldonado personally immerses himself in the lives of the students of the Ayotzinapa Normal School, having lived at the school for several months in the fall of 2014. In this narrative, he relives the events leading up to the attacks in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26 and 27, 2014. With in-depth interviews of family members and friends of the forcibly disappeared, as well as investigative reportage of the events, Maldonado has created a viscerally powerful account of this State act of injustice. Individual stories of the sons and their families are woven into a tapestry of tenderness and heartbreak which connect the reader to the victims and to our own humanity.
Faces of the Disappeared opens after the massacre, as the parents of the forty-three begin their protracted fight for justice:
"They’ve made the trip from their remote mountain villages in clothes they’ve rarely worn: store-bought shoes and pants. They’ve lost ancestral lands to eviction and watched their crops wither and their animals starve…. All that unites them at first are their forebodings. But, little by little, they come to realize that what they share in the depths of their souls is rage."
I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa
By John Gibler
Journalist John Gibler delivers a meticulous and affecting recreation of the events of Sept. 26/27, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero. This powerful oral history includes a chorus of voices: the eyewitness accounts of the students, the accounts of a teacher, soccer officials, reporters at the scene, parents of the forcibly disappeared, and others. It begins with the students discussing the teachers’ college and proceeds with an account of the eight-hour attack and the aftermath in the school’s basketball court, where the families gathered between search expeditions. I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us is a heartbreaking reconstruction of this horrific event, made all the more profound by the persistent demand from the parents of the disappeared, their classmates, and citizens across the globe for the safe return of the students.
Ayotzinapa: La Travesía De Las Tortugas
La Vida De Los Normalistas Antes Del 26 De Septiembre De 2014
By Marchando Con Letras
For seven months, 46 reporters, 15 photojournalists and 3 editors from different and independent media outlets formed the group Marchando con Letras (Marching with Letters) to reconstruct the fragments of the 43 forcibly disappeared Ayotzinapa students' lives; their dreams and memories.
This book is possible because each member of the collective donated their time, financed their own research, carried out in Guerrero and other states where the students are from, and interviewed the families, friends and teachers who lived with the normalistas before the attacks in Iguala on September 26/27, 2014. Originally complied in 2015, this book, currently only available in Spanish, was relaunched on September 24, 2019 at the PRODH Center.
Clemente Rodríguez, father of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre says “If this book could speak, if this book could cry, it is the tears of each of the parents."
Ayotzinapa: Horas Eternas
By Paula Mónaco Felipe
Though currently only available in Spanish language format, this book is an essential read, written from the perspective of one who experiences life under the shadow of their missing parents. On January 11, 1978, when Paula Mónaco Felipe was 25 days old, her parents Luis Monaco and Ester Felipe were kidnapped and disappeared by Argentine military. Paula is able to bring us closer to what the survivors, fathers, mothers, relatives and classmates of the Rural Normal Raúl Isidro Burgos students are living. More than 100 interviews comprise a unique chronicle of the attacks in Iguala on September 26 and 27, 2014. "I decided to include only the voices of victims as an attempt to contribute their testimonies to the construction of a plural history that integrates them instead of silencing them, as is often the case in official versions. The book includes biographies and photographs of each of the 43 forcibly disappeared students, plus the three killed and two critically injured in Iguala. The photographs are a selection from family albums; the students are seen with their parents, relatives and friends, with girlfriends and children. Also included are works by photojournalist Miguel Tovar in which we can see family members and activists in the struggle for truth and justice.
