It’s been ten years since 43 students disappeared in Mexico. Their parents are still fighting for answers

TIXTLA, Mexico (AP) — Clemente Rodríguez documents the long search for his missing son with tattoos.

First it was an ink drawing of a turtle — a symbol of the school of 19-year-old Christian Rodríguez — with a smaller turtle on its shell. Then an image of Mexico’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, accompanied by the number 43. Later, a tiger for strength and a dove for hope.

“How else is my son supposed to know I’m looking for him?” Rodríguez asked. For the heartbroken father, the body art is proof that he never stopped searching — proof he might one day be able to show his son.

On September 26, 2014, Christian Rodríguez, a tall boy who loved folk dancing and had just enrolled in a teacher training program in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared along with 42 classmates. Every year since then, on the 26th of each month, Clemente Rodríguez, his wife Luz María Telumbre, and other families have gathered at the Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa and taken a long bus ride to the capital, Mexico City, to demand answers.

Next week, on the tenth anniversary of their sons’ disappearance, they will do it again.

“It’s difficult, very difficult,” said Clemente Rodríguez.

There are many questions and few answers

Rodríguez and the other parents are not alone. The 43 students are among more than 115,000 people still reported missing in Mexico, a reflection of countless unsolved crimes in a country where human rights activists say violence, corruption and impunity have long been the norm.

Over the years, authorities have offered different explanations. The previous government of President Enrique Peña Nieto said the students were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug cartel, and that the bodies were then handed over to organized crime figures, who burned their bodies in a landfill and threw their ashes in a river. A bone fragment from one of the students was later found in the river.

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed the source of the attack. But the current Justice Department — along with the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights and a Truth Commission created specifically to investigate the students’ disappearance — refuted the story that the bodies were burned in a landfill. They accused former top officials of planting the bone fragment in the river to support their story. They also found evidence at another location, including bone fragments from one of Christian’s feet.

But the families still have no clear answer as to what happened to the students. Clemente Rodríguez, for his part, is far from convinced that his son is dead.

Parents begin desperate search for their children

Not long after the students disappeared, parents took matters into their own hands, traveling to remote, often gang-controlled mountain villages to find their children. They encountered others displaced by violence. Fear was everywhere.

“When I left the house, I never knew if I would come back alive,” said Rodríguez.

During the search, Christina Bautista, the 49-year-old mother of missing student Benjamin Ascencio, said strangers told her they had been looking for a son for three years or a daughter for five. She thought it would be a matter of weeks.

“I couldn’t take it anymore, I started running,” she said. “How could so many be gone?”

Dozens of bodies were found, but not those of their children.

A decade of fighting has turned lives upside down

A decade of fighting to keep the business alive has turned the parents’ lives upside down. Before his son’s disappearance, Rodríguez sold jugs of water from the back of his pickup truck and tended a small herd of animals in the town of Tixtla, not far from the school. Telumbre sold handmade tortillas cooked over a wood fire.

When the students disappeared, however, they dropped everything. Parents sold or abandoned their animals, left fields untended, and entrusted grandparents with the care of other children.

Rodríguez, 56, has since managed to partially reassemble his cattle herd and has planted some corn on the family’s plot of land. But the family’s main income comes from homemade crafts sold on trips to Mexico City: mats woven from reeds; bottles of an uncle’s locally brewed mezcal decorated with rope and colorful tiger faces; and cloth napkins embroidered by Telumbre.

Sometimes the stocky, soft-spoken Rodriguez visits his country to reflect or to express his anger and sadness. “I start crying, letting it all out,” he said.

Parents find support and respect at Ayotzinapa

Parents also find solace at the Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa.

The school, which trains students to teach in poor, remote villages, is part of a network of rural educational institutions with a long history of radical activism. School walls painted with slogans demanding justice for the missing students also feature murals honoring Che Guevara and Karl Marx.

For the poorest families, Ayotzinapa offers a way out: students receive free room, board and tuition. In return, they work.

The atmosphere has militaristic undertones: new students have their heads shaved, and the first year is all about discipline and survival. They are tasked with herding cattle, planting fields and commandeering buses bound for protests in the capital. The students who disappeared in 2014 were abducted from five buses they had commandeered in the city of Iguala, 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of the school.

Parents arrived in Ayotzinapa little by little from villages deep in the mountains. They gathered on the school’s basketball court, a concrete slab beneath a pavilion where 43 chairs still bear photos of each of the missing students.

In the years since, a certain codependency has developed. The school’s fight for justice has been fueled by the parents’ grief and anger. The school’s students have become “our strong arm,” Bautista says. “This is where the movement started.”

Students treat parents with respect and love, greeting them as “aunt” or “uncle” as they pass through the guarded gates.

Another encounter ends in disappointment and anger

In late August, Rodríguez and other parents last met with López Obrador, who is stepping down at the end of this month.

The exchange ended in great disappointment.

“Right now, this government is like Enrique Peña Nieto’s,” Rodríguez said. “He has tried to ridicule us” by hiding information, protecting the military and insulting the families’ lawyers, he said.

López Obrador insists his government has done its best to find answers. He cites dozens of arrests, including that of a former attorney general who has been charged with obstructing justice. But he has downplayed the military’s role. Years ago, López Obrador declared the students’ kidnapping a “state crime,” citing the involvement of local, state and federal authorities, including the military.

The families met in July with López Obrador’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, who will take office on October 1. However, she made no promises or commitments.

After the August meeting, Rodríguez posed for a portrait at the National Palace, his gaze steady and his fist raised.

Like other parents, he vows to keep fighting.

“During these 10 years we have learned a lot about embezzlement … lies,” Rodríguez said. Top military and government authorities “have the answers,” he added.

“They can reveal them.”

María Verza, The Associated Press