Cristina Bautista Salvador

Mother of Benjamín Asencio Bautista

Cristina Bautista arrives at the Angel of Independence roundabout and lays a blanket on the ground. She displays her handmade earrings, made from palm leaves. They cost 50 Mexican pesos, or a little more than $2.00. She tries to sell what she can, until she’s told that it’s time to stand in front of the marchers and begin the protest.

Cristina has been demanding the same thing since September 26, 2014: to be told what exactly happened to her son.

Perhaps the image that best reflects what has happened to the parents of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College is that of Cristina Bautista setting up her improvised stand, before taking her place in the first line of the march. She was born and lived her entire life in Alpuyecancingo, a small community in the municipality of Ahuacoutzingo. It’s located in the highlands of Guerrero, one of the most impoverished areas in Mexico. That’s where she gave birth to her three children.

On the morning of September 29, 2014, her youngest daughter told her that a teacher at school had asked about her brother. The teacher knew that Benjamín had enrolled in the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School – commonly known as the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College – because he had encouraged his former student to become a teacher. Cristina thought that the polite inquiry was simply a kind gesture. But later that morning, Cruz Bautista – Benjamín’s uncle – told her that a newspaper had reported that there were students missing after a confrontation with the police. The newspaper published a list that included the name of Benjamín Asencio Bautista. Cristina immediately left for the college.

The three-and-a-half hour drive from Alpuyecancingo to Ayotzinapa seemed eternal to her. She was not used to leaving her community, and this was the second time in a month that she had visited Ayotzinapa. The first time had been 10 days earlier, for an event organized for the parents of new students.

Her arrival at the Teachers’ College coincided with the arrival of a bus filled with students, who had returned to campus after searching for their classmates. She looked around, trying to recognize her son's face, but she couldn't find him. She felt ashamed to ask about Benjamín’s whereabouts: she decided to stay standing in the street. “I was hoping that, if I stayed still, Benjamin would see me from inside [the bus or the school] and come out to be with me,” she recalls, as if the events happened 10 hours ago, not 10 years ago.

When night fell, she had no choice but to approach the college to ask about her son. A young man asked Cristian for her son’s name: he looked for it in a notebook. Unable to find it, he confirmed that her son was missing. “But don't worry, tía. Little by little, the kids are appearing. Yesterday, a large group arrived. And today, they went looking for more. They’ll show up soon,” he explained, trying to reassure her. Then, he invited her to join the other parents who were waiting in the main courtyard of the school.

Cristina didn’t return home that night, or the following nights. The school gave the parents a space where they could put mats on the floor and stay there. She ended up spending 19 months living in a room at the Teachers’ College. She didn’t want to leave the school. Today, she’s still certain that she did the right thing by not leaving. “I knew that, if Benjamín returned, he would turn up there,” she sighs.

After more than a year-and-a-half, one morning, she woke up and couldn’t see: her eyes were very swollen. A physician from Doctors Without Borders diagnosed her with high blood pressure and explained that she couldn’t continue sleeping on the floor. The residents in the area took pity on her and let her live for a while in a house very close to the Teachers’ College. Since then, she has been offered similar generosity on several occasions. She has lived in five different houses in recent years – all borrowed and all less than 1,000 feet from the school.

“We have to be here on the lookout for any information that may arise,” she says, with conviction in her voice.

Cristina doesn’t fully understand the legal terms that surround the case, nor has anyone sat down to explain them to her. Her mother tongue is Nahuatl, which is why she has a hard time reading all the Spanish-language information that’s published about the Ayotzinapa case. When asked what has worn her down the most in these 10 years, she answers without any hesitation: “Not being able to sleep. Because you come home tired from a meeting or a march, you go to bed to rest and think about your son… and then, it’s another sleepless night.”

Bernabé Abraham Gaspar

Father of Adán Abraham de la Cruz

Don Berna – which is what everybody calls him – remembers the day he began to walk through the town of Filo de Caballos, asking about the boys from the Teachers’ College. He knew that he was walking through one of the most violent areas in the state of Guerrero. Deep in the mountains, it’s famous for being the main region that produces the poppy plant, from which opium gum is scraped.

Hours earlier, he had decided to start looking for his son alone. He couldn’t resign himself to being stuck at home, missing him. Don Berna went to the most dangerous area of the mountain region with a backpack, carrying food and some flowers that he grew with the help of Adán, his son.

“I spent three days there, until a man approached me and said: ‘Don’t ask any more [questions] out here.’ It was already getting late, and it was very risky,” he says, reflecting on those days after the night in Iguala.

Ten years later, he’s sitting in the living room of his house in Tixtla, in front of a photo of Adán that rests on an altar honoring Saint Martín Caballero. Don Berna is now 60-years-old. He says he’s tired, but he isn’t going to stop searching. He just shared this sentiment with President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, in a meeting the parents had with her on July 29.

Over the past decade, Don Berna has fallen ill: his legs hurt and he cannot sit for very long. He was recently diagnosed with hemorrhagic dengue and spent 15 days in the hospital because his platelet count dropped. The after-effects include back pain, arm pain and headaches. Before Iguala, he planted crops – corn or beans – on his six or seven acres of farmland. He tilled the soil with Adán. What he misses most is talking with him, out in the field, while they worked side-by-side.

After his son’s disappearance, Don Berna stopped farming. “I missed him a lot when I was there all by myself, so I stopped going. The searches, meetings and marches also take up a lot of time. I left the countryside.” He tells EL PAÍS this story in a slow, soft voice. From 2014 onwards, he remembers conducting searches with the Federal Police. Parents were asked to join, but women weren’t allowed: only men. Mothers who didn’t have a partner sent a brother, a brother-in-law, or another close male relative.

Don Berna recalls the night of September 26, but particularly the morning, when he took Adán to the Teachers’ College. His son had the flu and had spent the night at home, but in the morning, he asked his father to take him to campus: there was an activity scheduled – the famous march in Iguala – that he couldn’t miss. Don Berna took Adán to the school in a truck and never saw him again. That’s why it’s harder for him to forget the morning – rather than the night – of September 26.

During a meeting in 2015, the lawyers from the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center explained to the parents that they had an invitation to go to Geneva, Switzerland, so that they could present their case to the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances. But they – the parents – had to go. Nobody raised their hand: they didn’t understand how attending would benefit them. In the end, Don Berna volunteered.

“I thought about going because, maybe there, they would tell me where my son is, or where the boys are.” But everything turned out differently than he imagined. What he remembers most about that trip is that the people who approached him had a warped understanding about what was happening in Mexico. “I told them that the bad guys or the police had disappeared [the boys] – which was the same thing – and they responded by saying that they couldn’t imagine how that could happen.” He says that hearing this made him sad: he realized that the reality of what was happening to the parents wasn’t being comprehended.

Today, in a cruel irony, Don Berna grows cempasúchil – the flowers of the dead. He only does this during the season closest to the holidays, because it’s easy to grow crops and it helps him earn a living. He won’t go back to planting corn until Adán returns, or until he’s told what happened to him. And he won’t take down the photograph that he always stares at before leaving his house.

Hilda Legideño Vargas

Mother of Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño

In 2020, Hilda Legideño saw a photo on Facebook of a young man lying on a street in Mexicali, in the state of Baja California. A homeless shelter would share photos of homeless people on social media, in case a family member recognized them. In the post, the young man was sleeping on the floor and part of his face could be seen; the rest was covered by his jacket.

Hilda looked at the image and saw the resemblance to Jorge Antonio. She couldn't be sure, as the photo only showed half of his face. But his mouth looked like Jorge's. Hilda started making calls, until Alejandro Encinas – then the undersecretary of Human Rights in Mexico – answered the phone.

She still doesn't know exactly how, but she managed to get herself on a plane to Baja California. The lawyers and people closest to her were upset. “You must understand that your son is dead, not in Tijuana,” someone told Hilda. She doesn’t want to mention the person by name, because the comment hurt her greatly.

When she arrived at the shelter, the staff told her that they didn’t have much information about the young man in the photo. “He’s a homeless man who cleans cars and lives between Tijuana and Mexicali,” was the only thing they could tell her. She began to walk along the border wall with the photo of the young man lying on the ground, asking people about him, telling them that he was her son. “I would tell them: ‘he’s my son, he’s a student in Guerrero, he’s one of those who are missing.’”

She begins to cry very slowly as she recounts this, without making a sound. She has to remain silent for a moment and swallow heavily before continuing her story.

Finally, in Tijuana, in another shelter, someone showed her a video of the young man washing cars… and she was able to confirm that it wasn’t her son after all. She returned to Mexico City for a meeting, where she received more criticism. “How could you go all the way there?” people asked her.

Hilda is no longer affected by such criticism. In the last decade, she’s been accused of all kinds of things. “I always think that they don’t understand, because they don’t have a missing person [in their lives],” she reflects. “They’ve told us everything, but as a mother, you’re not going to fail your son. If they’re so sure that [our kids] are dead, let them prove it to us. Imagine if we’d been satisfied with that version, when they told us that our children were in the river.”

It’s 4 p.m. in Ayotzinapa. Hilda closes her small shop, which is located a few feet from the entrance to the Teachers’ College. Before the night of September 26, she had her house and a grocery store in Tixtla. Then, everything changed. Today, she sells t-shirts and bracelets at the doors of the school: all of her items refer to “the 43.”

Hilda finds it difficult for her to speak and give interviews – she doesn’t like it. She remembers when her son enrolled at school. He came home and told her: “You’re going to have to accompany me to the march: they ask us to march and for our parents to accompany us.” She didn’t like any of those things: the parties, the protests, speaking in public in front of so many people. That’s why she doesn’t watch the documentaries or newscasts that she’s appeared in. She’s tired of everything – of people telling her that her son is dead, of people asking her if she gets emotional when she meets with the president. “But what tires me the most are the lies. It cannot be that they lie to us so much, right to our faces.”

Clemente Rodríguez Moreno

Father of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre

Clemente Rodríguez never missed the rodeos in his town; he loved dancing and partying. He was a cheerful and fun-loving man, who enjoyed running and playing basketball. But today, he’s sad, tired and overweight.

The truth is that he’s not overweight… but that’s how he feels. Ever since the day Christian disappeared with his classmates from the Teacher’s College, everything has been different in the Rodríguez Telumbre family home. Ten years ago, Clemente sold jugs of water throughout the town of Tixtla, aboard a small truck. On weekends, the owner kept the vehicle and Clemente went out to sell water on a three-wheeled bike. Today, he remembers his son while sitting in the living room of his house, with an aged face and a ringing in his ear that he says won’t go away.

Clemente hardly looks up when he talks. He never imagined being in front of a room full of young people who want to hear what he has to say. Yet, nowadays, he does this three or four times a month.

Once, at the end of a march, a professor from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) reached out to Clemente and invited him to come to his class and speak with the students. Since then, Clemente hasn’t stopped receiving invitations to different schools and universities. He always ends by asking the young people to take care of themselves, so that what happened to his son doesn’t happen to them. This past month, he’s already given two talks and has invitations for the next four weeks.

Still, Clemente is tired of everything. “So many fucking meetings that are useless,” he says tiredly, but not angrily. He’s had to deal with everything: the marches, the sit-ins, the hunger strike in front of the barracks, the face-to-face with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He told the outgoing president that he’s finishing his term without fulfilling his commitments… especially without touching the Mexican Army.

“I told him face-to-face at the last meeting that there are 800 military [files] that are missing, you promised us things and you’re already leaving.” The complaint was filled with the frustration that had accumulated during the years of the president’s administration (2018-2024). Clemente went even further: “You’ve dedicated your morning press conferences to attacking our lawyers, you say that they’ve manipulated us. Well, here we are. But you didn’t answer me.”

He assures EL PAÍS that Sheinbaum – the incoming president – is the new hope. He already told her that she must “set an example for all of these people.” Clemente and his family have become more united since the tragedy. He may have missed about five marches during all these years, but his family has always been present. He has his wife, his daughters and his sister-in-law, who came to live with them to always be present at the demonstrations.

One day, in July 2020, a little over four years ago, Alejandro Encinas and Omar Gómez Trejo – the then-prosecutor for the Special Investigation and Litigation Unit for the Ayotzinapa Case – came to his house, accompanied by people from the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center. They brought him the forensic results of a bone fragment from a human foot, found in a ravine in the city of Cocula. That small bone fragment, they told him, had been sent to the laboratory at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and the results had confirmed that it belonged to Christian, his son.

For Encinas and Gómez Trejo, this was a breakthrough in the case. The fragment had been recovered in a different place than the garbage dump and the river, the places where the narrative pushed by the previous government had been built.

But Clemente and his family were far from seeing it as a breakthrough or good news. It was just a small bone. There was no more information: only assumptions, speculations… the truth distributed in fragments, like the three bones that have been found over the course of 10 years.

Clemente pauses. He cannot accept that his son is dead just because he’s been told about a two-inch-long bone fragment. This is all that’s been offered to him, after an investigation that has gone on for a decade.