Fue el estado—the state did it. A decade ago, this slogan became indelibly linked in Mexico to the disappearance of forty-three students enrolled at a teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, who were kidnapped on the night of September 26, 2014. Only three students’ remains have been identified; the rest number among the more than 125,000 disappeared people in Mexico. Since the start of President Felipe Calderón’s “war on drugs” in late 2006, mass graves and missing-persons posters have become part of everyday life.
Amid this incalculable suffering, the Ayotzinapa victims became symbols of a larger culture of official impunity. Protesters regularly invoked their memory to demand state accountability. Writing in 2015, the Mexican anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz considered the tragedy “the nodal point of the most important social movement to appear in the country since the beginning of the war in 2006.” The students’ disappearance, he wrote, sparked a crisis that “runs even deeper than the events of 1968 or 1994 — the year of the Zapatista rebellion — and that has made the clamor for justice resound more strongly, more painfully, and more urgently than ever.”
In an interview last year, Lomnitz struck a less optimistic note. “The social movement that emerged . . . did not manage to create transitional justice,” he said. “It could have happened, but it did not.” Lomnitz had hoped the response to Ayotzinapa could be “a springboard” for something like Argentina’s postdictatorship reckoning; but he no longer believes such a development is possible.
The problem is not one of deadlock or stagnation. In the past decade Mexico has undergone a major political shift, with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (universally known as AMLO) leading his upstart Morena party to a decisive victory at the polls in 2018, solidified by the election of his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, in 2024. AMLO, an idiosyncratic left populist, claims to have inaugurated a transformative new era in government. Yet ordinary Mexicans remain just as vulnerable to violence and barred from justice as they were before. The first hundred days of Sheinbaum’s presidency saw some 4,000 new disappearances — an average of forty a day.
What does it mean to chant fue el estado? What is the state, and what did it do? In Mexico, these are hardly straightforward questions, and they lie at the heart of Lomnitz’s recent research. In his view, the slogan is both true and misleading. The state’s fingerprints are all over cases like Ayotzinapa, where institutions at every level — local police, the municipal government, the army units deployed in Guerrero, and the military and civilian authorities who orchestrated a botched cover-up — all bear responsibility for the crime and the failure of justice that followed. Yet fue el estado also presumes a wishful notion of what Lomnitz calls “a vertically integrated state,” where a clear chain of command connects the president to the institutions that ordinary people interact with. Mexico’s hyperpresidential system helps sustain that illusion, but most of what the state does is carried out by a jumble of competing and internally divided power centers rather than a single hierarchy. Lomnitz agrees that the state is finally responsible, but believes that achieving accountability requires a clearer understanding of what kind of structure that state is and how it works.
