Ten years ago, 43 students disappeared in Mexico. Their parents are still fighting for answers

TIXTLA, Mexico (AP) — Clemente Rodríguez documented 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 the patron saint of Mexico, the Virgin of Guadalupe, accompanied by the number 43. Later a tiger for strength and a dove for hope.

“How else will my son know that I've been looking for him?” asked Rodríguez. For the heartbroken father, the body art is proof that he never stopped looking – proof that he may 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 school in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared along with 42 classmates. Since then, every year on the 26th of the month, Clemente Rodríguez, his wife Luz María Telumbre and other families meet at the Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa and take a long bus ride to the capital, Mexico City, to demand answers.

They will do so again next week, on the tenth anniversary of their sons' disappearance.

“It’s hard, very hard,” 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 missing in Mexico, reflecting the number of unsolved crimes in a country where violence, corruption and impunity have long been the order of the day, according to human rights activists.

Over the years, authorities have given different explanations. The previous government of President Enrique Peña Nieto said the students were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug cartel. The bodies were then handed over to organized crime, which burned their corpses in a garbage dump and scattered 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 Ministry – along with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and a truth commission created specifically to investigate the students' disappearance – refuted the story about the bodies being burned in a garbage dump. They accused senior former officials of placing the bone fragments in the river to support their story. They also dug up evidence at another location, including bone fragments from one of Christian's feet.

But the families still have no clear answers as to what happened to the students. Clemente Rodríguez, on the other hand, is far from convinced that his son is dead.

Parents desperately search for their children

Soon after the students disappeared, parents took matters into their own hands and stormed into remote mountain villages, often controlled by gangs, to search for their children. They encountered others who had been displaced by the violence. Fear reigned everywhere.

“When I left the house, I didn’t know if I would come back alive,” Rodríguez said.

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

“I couldn't stand it and I ran away,” she said. “How could so many people disappear?”

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

A decade of struggle has turned lives upside down

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

When the students disappeared, however, they left everything behind. The parents sold or abandoned their animals, left the fields uncultivated and entrusted the care of other children to the grandparents.

Rodríguez, 56, has since managed to partially restore his livestock and has grown some corn on the family property, but the family's main income comes from homemade crafts that they sell on trips to Mexico City: mats woven from reeds, bottles of an uncle's locally brewed mezcal decorated with string and colorful tiger faces, and cloth napkins embroidered by Telumbre.

Sometimes the stocky, soft-spoken Rodríguez visits his country to reflect or to give vent to his anger and sadness. “I start crying and let everything go,” he says.

Parents find support and respect in Ayotzinapa

Parents also find comfort in 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. Slogans demanding justice for the missing students are painted on the school walls, as are murals honoring Che Guevara and Karl Marx.

Ayotzinapa offers a way out for the poorest families: students receive free accommodation, food and training. In return, they work.

The atmosphere is militaristic: the new students' heads are shaved, and the first year is all about discipline and survival. They have to tend cattle, work fields and commandeer buses to travel to protests in the capital. The students who disappeared in 2014 were kidnapped from five buses they had hijacked in the city of Iguala, 120 kilometers north of the school.

Parents from villages deep in the mountains gradually arrived in Ayotzinapa. They gathered on the school's basketball court, a concrete slab under a gazebo where 43 chairs still hold photos of the missing students.

In the years that followed, a certain interdependence developed. The school's fight for justice is fueled by the parents' grief and anger. The school's students, on the other hand, “are our strong arm,” says Bautista. “This is where the movement began.”

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

Another meeting ends in disappointment and anger

At the end of August, Rodríguez and other parents met for the last time with López Obrador, who is leaving office at the end of this month.

The exchange was a big disappointment.

“Right now, this government is just like Enrique Peña Nieto's,” Rodríguez said. “He tried to mock us” by withholding information, protecting the army and insulting the families' lawyers, he said.

López Obrador continues to insist that his government has done its best to find answers, pointing to dozens of arrests, including that of a former attorney general accused of obstruction of justice, but downplaying the military's role. Years ago, López Obrador called the kidnapping of the students a “state crime” and pointed to the involvement of local, state and federal authorities, including the army.

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

After the meeting in August, Rodríguez posed for a portrait in the National Palace with a firm gaze and raised fist.

Like other parents, he vows to keep fighting.

“In these ten years we have learned a lot about cover-ups and lies,” Rodríguez said. The top military and government authorities “have the answers,” he added.

“You can disclose them.”