On 26 September 2014, a group of male students set out in a convoy of buses bound for Mexico City. They were travelling from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College to attend a demonstration commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre in which Mexican police and military killed hundreds of unarmed protesters. En route, their convoy was repeatedly attacked, six people were killed, many injured and 43 disappeared, presumed murdered. As news of the killings spread, the government begacampaignof lies, obfuscation and ‘confessions’ obtained by torture in an attempt to divert blame from the true perpetrators: agents of the state, acting under orders of the then-ruling PRI party.
Campaigning journalist Anabel Hernández has painstakingly reconstructed the lead-up to that bloody night and its shameful aftermath, in which the authorities paraded barefaced lies as the ‘historic truth’. She draws on a vast array of sources, both government documents clandestinely obtained and eyewitness testimony, to present a minute-by-minute account of what really happened and build a forensic case which demolishes the official version put forward by state officials, police and prosecutors.
