BOB GARFIELD:  This is On the Media. I’m Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend, a group of eminent international legal experts is leaving Mexico without the clear answer they came for:  Why did 43 students vanish on the night of September 26th, 2014, never to be seen again?

WOMAN:  A classroom now serves as both a memorial and a base for the parents as they continue to search for their sons.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Those students who attended Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College were a promising group from a severely impoverished part of the country.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  To make a living, young men here head north to the United States to cross the border or get trapped into the army or join the drug gangs. These students are the brightest kids from this area, and it’s considered very prestigious to get accepted into this teachers’ college.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Francisco Goldman has been reporting on the case for the New Yorker’s website.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  For years, all the normal schools get together and have a convention, and this year they had elected the kids from the Ayotzinapa normal school to be in charge of gathering buses to take students from all the normal schools to Mexico City.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  To get to that event, actually the commemoration of a 1968 student massacre, the students commandeered buses from the town of Iguala. Commandeering buses for this purpose was also a tradition. The authorities usually turned an indulgent blind eye to what essentially was hijacking. But on that night in 2014, municipal police intercepted the buses, killed and injured several of the 100 students and then “disappeared” 43 others.

In response to national and global outcry, the Mexican government invited in that aforementioned team of legal experts, who were essentially expelled this week. They included a Guatemalan attorney general who’d brought genocide charges against a former dictator and a Colombian prosecutor of military malfeasance. For over a year, they rigorously scrutinized the government's version of what befell the missing 43, a narrative that, as novelist and journalist Francisco Goldman explains, has been officially dubbed “the historical truth.”

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  In October of 2014, the head attorney general announced that, based on the confessions of gang members, the 43 students had been taken by the municipal police from Iguala and Cocula to the municipal dump and there handed over to drug traffickers from the drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, in Iguala who, in their confessions, said that they had burnt them alive in that dump and that the people who’d burnt the bodies in this 12-hour massive bonfire were told to get rid of those remains. They took them to a river where they dumped some of those remains in plastic bags, and the remains that recovered from that river yielded the only positive DNA identification so far to one of the students. This seemed to confirm, according to the government, the truth of what they were alleging. So this was called “the historical truth.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So how does the report of the investigators differ from the historic truth?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Okay, the historic truth was demolished by the first report the experts released on September 6th of last year. And don't forget, the experts were invited in through the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights because the worldwide outcry over the government's handling of this case backed the government into a corner. They never expected this expert group to respond with such an obsessive, thorough, coherent legal masterpiece of investigation.

First of all, they had a fire expert who showed that it was impossible to have burnt 43 bodies in that particular dump.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Okay? They showed that the government had ignored all kinds of testimony from the many students who survived that it wasn't just municipal police, that federal authorities had been involved in the attacks. Federal police had attacked some of the buses, people from the local military base had been all over the place, and the students were being monitored, from the moment they left Ayotzinapa, by military intelligence, federal police the whole time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  But why?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Why? This is the question they keep asking. The government strategy has been over and over to make it seem as if it was all about whether the 43 were burned in the dump or not. They don’t want to address the fact that this was a massive operation, involving all kinds of authorities –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  - because then why? Why would federal and military authorities be involved in an attack on teaching students?

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Yeah!

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  I’ve been around experts a lot. They were given 180,000 pages of witness testimony, anything the police had collected, unorganized. Ángela Buitrago, who’s been a prosecutor in the worst years in Colombia, she discovered a video from the bus station, that the Attorney General’s Office was apparently trying to hide. In their scenario there were four buses. They found a fifth bus. Going through these massive papers, she calls up one of the other experts at 5 in the morning, saying, I just found this handwritten confession from the bus driver. He confirms the student survivors’ version, that that fifth bus was stopped by the federal police, not municipal police. They just wanted the bus. The students were taken off the bus, they ran off into the hills. What’s going on? They discovered that there’s a case in federal court in the United States about heroin traffickers from this town, Iguala, from this gang, who were trafficking heroin to the United States in commercial buses.

Now you begin to see a scenario. Why is every bus trying to leave that city that night of the attack? Don’t forget, they attacked a bus carrying a soccer team that had nothing to do the students. They were clearly under orders to not let any bus escape the security cordon. And the most reasonable hypothesis right now is that an alarm went out. Maybe the students accidentally took a bus loaded with heroin.

The experts demand to see the bus. So they’re shown a bus. They compare it to the bus in the bus station security camera, send it to a video forensic expert in the United States –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Wow.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  - who tell them it’s not the same bus. Then they ask [LAUGHS] to meet the bus driver. It’s not the same bus driver.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Wow.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Right? Who, of course, [ ? ] having written that handwritten letter, and so when the September 6^th informant came out –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  The investigator’s first report.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Yes, it did such a good job demolishing the historical truth, the attorney general resigned. That investigative unit that was responsible for the historical truth was taken off the case. They felt like maybe the government is gonna to be serious, we’re gonna go forward and get to the bottom of this.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  The experts give January 8^th as the day everything changed.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  January 8^th.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Yeah, where all of a sudden collaboration stopped. They were supposed to go out into the mountains and look for gravesites that day. Those trips were canceled. And, at that point, an orchestrated media campaign begins trying to defame each of the experts individually.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is in Mexico's biggest newspapers -

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  It starts with plants, often, in the scummy little right-wing paper called La Razón. It’s a bit like a low-circulation New York Post.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  And stories get planted there and then they get picked up by Milenio, Excélsior, Universal, you know, the bigger mainstream papers and, of course, the TV stations.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  One of these plants [?] was that they were getting paid an inappropriately high salary for the job that they were doing. What else was there?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  If you're a good independent [LAUGHS] prosecutor, wherever you are, you’re gonna make enemies. [LAUGHS] So they have these sort of right-wing citizens’ groups in Mexico who went to these countries and found their enemies –

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Ah!

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  - and brought them to Mexico. So you had really absurd things, like the Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, they accused her of having abetted President Pérez Molina's corruption. This is so ridiculous. Pérez Molina’s now in jail for corruption. He had her terminated from her job seven months before it was supposed to end. She was obviously a crusader [LAUGHS] of his corruption and she, of course, became internationally renowned when she brought the genocide charge against former dictator Ríos Montt.

I mean, this woman is a dynamo. Every one of the experts got attacked on something like that. And all throughout this, the experts demanded, among other things, to interview the military.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  And, of course, that was continually denied. They asked the PGR, which is the Attorney General's Office, to open a formal inquiry in the United States about the bus case, and they dragged their feet on that. And only a few weeks ago, when it was obvious that the experts’ term was not going to be renewed, did they finally do that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So this past week, the final report of the investigation was released. What was the mood?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Well, they presented the report in a university in downtown Mexico City. The place was jammed, this beautiful old colonial courtyard. The family members, you know, the mothers and fathers of those disappeared boys, who have become symbols throughout Mexico and throughout the world as fighters on behalf of the tens of thousands of disappeared people in Mexico, right, this was like a collective hope that somehow these boys, these 43 boys, stood for all the disappeared and if we could begin to show a seriousness in Mexico about resolving this case, maybe there’d be hope for other cases. So there were the family members, and they began to chant, you know, “no te vayas,” you know, don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t abandon us.

 [CLIP/FAMILY MEMBERS CHANTING]:

No te vayas, no te vayas.

 [END CLIP]

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  It was really sad. I know the experts are really worried about what’s gonna happen to the families. I mean, one of the things that most moved me was just this moment where they were talking about, like well, we were never allowed to question the military. So in the press conference right after someone says, what would you have asked the military? Claudia Paz y Paz, the former Guatemalan attorney general, she said, well, one question I would have asked them is, you know, it's been proven that they knew what was going on. They were out in the streets. They saw wounded students. Some people even brought wounded to the gates of the battalion headquarters, and they were turned away. And she said, we would have asked them, why didn’t you do anything to stop it? You know, the army, of course, they could have stopped it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  There was a, a recent New York Times op-ed written by the former Mexico City correspondent, Ginger Thompson?

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Mm-hmm. [AFFIRMATIVE]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  She said that Mexican officials are more concerned about their image abroad than with the corruption and violence at home, like they really care about the insults hurled at Mexico by Donald Trump recently. She wrote, and I wonder what you think of this, “Mr. Trump is partly used by the government as a distraction. It's simpler to focus on foreign demons, rather than on internal ones.”

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  I think that they definitely used Trump to distract. They used “El Chapo” Guzman to distract, the whole show with Sean Penn and everything. I just think that there's no easy answer to the problem of, of institutional corruption in Mexico. It’s so deep.

But things have happened in the aftermath of this press conference, by the way, that are really interesting, that are going to make it very hard for the Mexican government prosecutors to just close the case, now that the experts are gone and now that outside vigilance seems to have vanished. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights is intent on staying involved. I think they’ve been surprised by the level of international media attention over the last week that the report has gotten, and it’s a very negative reaction all over the world [LAUGHS] to the experts being forced to leave, and evidence, like the allegations of torture, allegations caught on video that suggest planting of evidence by a key prosecutor in the case, that these things are opening potential paths to keep this case very much alive and maybe provoke another chapter in the investigation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Francisco, thank you very much.

FRANCISCO GOLDMAN:  Thank you, it's been a pleasure.

 [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Francisco Goldman has been reporting on Mexico’s missing 43 for the newyorker.com. He is also the author of The Interior Circuit:  A Mexico City Chronicle and Say Her Name.

BOB GARFIELD:  That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Kimmie Regler, Meara Sharma, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Jesse Brenneman and Dasha Lisitsina. We had more help from our intern, David Conrad, who is leaving us this week to finish his dissertation! Good luck, David, we hope you come back very soon. And our show was edited - by Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Cayce Means and Casey Holford.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Jim Schachter is WNYC's vice president for news. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I’m Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD:  And I’m Bob Garfield.