IGUALA, Mexico (AP) — Ulises Martínez still feels uncomfortable in this city, even though it’s been 10 years because 43 fellow students from a teacher training college in the countryside were abducted here.
Martínez was in his third year at the Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, an institution known for its radical social justice activism, about 120 kilometers south of Iguala in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.
The students who disappeared on September 26, 2014, had seized five buses in Iguala on their way to Mexico City to attend the commemoration of the massacre in which nearly 300 people were attacked by government forces during a student protest in 1968.
The Mexican government has determined that students at the Rural Normal School were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug cartel, but many questions remain about what happened to them.
Martínez has reconstructed a timeline as part of his personal commitment to finding justice. Here’s what he remembers:
9:30 PM, September 26, 2014
In Ayotzinapa, students hear that their classmates are having problems in Iguala and leave for the city in two vans.
10:00 p.m.
The highway is empty, but at an intersection about 16 kilometers (10 miles) from Iguala, armed men in a pickup truck block the road. “When we saw that, we knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” Martínez said.
The student driving steps on the gas pedal and drives around the roadblock. No shots are fired.
22:20 hrs
On the way to Iguala, they see one of the five buses their classmates had taken. It has been torn apart. The tires are flat, the windows are broken, and the luggage compartments are open. They also see a handful of first-year students running away. When they turn around to pick them up, they are gone. At the same time, they receive desperate phone calls from other students who have been attacked, trying to describe where they are so that Martínez and his companions can pick them up.
10:30 pm
Martínez and the others arrive at the terminal where the students had previously taken the buses. They ask taxi drivers to take them to a place that matches the students’ descriptions, but the drivers refuse, saying that they are forbidden to go there.
11:00 p.m.
Driving through the center of Iguala, the students find three buses, all shot at. Some students are there, crying. “They couldn’t comprehend what had happened,” Martínez said.
Martínez climbs into one of the buses and sees pools of blood and seats riddled with bullet holes.
“It looked really bad,” he said. “We waited for the authorities, but no one came.”
Confusion reigns. Students guard the scene, fearful that someone will try to remove the canisters or pick up the shell casings. They call a local news outlet.
00:30 hrs, September 27, 2014
During an impromptu press conference, Martinez walks toward a pool of blood left where witnesses say a student was shot in the head. A red vehicle slowly pulls up and several men in black get out.
“One knelt down,” Martinez said. “First he shot in the air and then he started shooting at close range.”
Martinez freezes in fear. A news reporter trips over him and they both fall to the ground.
Martínez then hides behind a bus wheel. Someone yells at him to run. One student runs away alone and another is shot in the jaw and starts bleeding profusely.
When the shooting stops, a woman tells them to take him to a nearby hospital. “They’re going to kill you,” she says.
Martínez and his companions later discover that two students have died on the spot.
01.00 am
The students enter a small clinic, where the nurses allow an injured student to sit but do not treat him.
Martínez and a classmate from Iguala climb onto the roof of the clinic to see if they have been followed. Martínez calls his father to say goodbye in case he doesn’t survive.
Two army trucks arrive. Martínez’s classmate wants to jump off the roof. Martínez says no, it will be safer on an army base nearby. But his classmate says that’s not true.
Soldiers, drug dealers, police officers. “They’re all the same,” the other student warns.
The soldiers gather everyone downstairs. They tell the students to identify themselves in a notebook and warn them not to give false names. The soldiers then get a phone call and leave, but say that the police are on their way to pick up the students.
01:15 am
The students flee before the police arrive. They convince a taxi driver to take their injured classmate to the hospital, while the rest run down the street and eventually find a house where 30 students who survived the attack in Iguala have taken refuge.
“I hid between a water tank and a washing machine,” Martínez said. “I found a wooden rosary and put it on.”
A girl moves Martínez and five others to another house to hide. No one sleeps.
05.00 am
Students give statements to state investigators. One goes in search of the classmates who are still missing.
A gruesome photo of Julio Cesár Mondragón, the student who ran away alone when gunshots were fired, has begun to circulate: his face has been torn off.
09:00 am
Martínez is sent to keep an eye on injured classmates in the hospital. He stays for four days, sleeping on a piece of cardboard on the floor.
The night of terror is over, but a new nightmare is about to begin: Martínez and others will soon discover the full, terrifying scale of the attack. And they will spend the next 10 years fighting to find answers.
