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“Journalist Gibler (To Die in Mexico) delivers a meticulous and affecting re-creation of the events of Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Mexico, when police attacked five buses carrying students from the Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College and a youth soccer team. Six people died, 40 were wounded, and 43 students were loaded into police trucks and never seen again. This powerful oral history includes a chorus of voices: mainly the eyewitness accounts of the students but also the accounts of a teacher, soccer officials, reporters at the scene, parents of ‘the disappeared,’ and others. It begins with the students discussing the teachers’ college—why they chose it (for many, because it’s free) and its values of social action—and proceeds with an account of the eight-hour attack and the aftermath in the school’s basketball court, where the families gathered between search expeditions. Gibler, in his afterword, highlights how the scale of the tragedy galvanized Mexico, a country where the drug war ‘enabled these forced disappearances,’ and eventually led to an independent investigation by a panel of international experts, the findings of which contradict the government’s story. It’s a heartbreaking reconstruction of a horrific event, made all the more profound by the persistent demand from the parents of the disappeared, their classmates, and citizens across country for the safe return of the students.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In Mexico, John Gibler’s book has been recognized as a journalistic masterpiece, an instant classic, and the most powerful indictment available of the devastating state crime committed against the 43 disappeared Ayotizinapa students in Iguala. This meticulous, choral re-creation of the events of that night is brilliantly vivid and alive, it will terrify and inspire you and shatter your heart.”

—Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle

“The hideous Ayotzinapa atrocity reveals with vivid horror how Mexico is being destroyed by the U.S.-based ‘drug war’ and its tentacles, penetrating deeply into the security system, business, and government, and strangling what is decent and hopeful in Mexican society. Gibler’s remarkable investigations lift the veil from these terrible crimes and call for concerted action to extirpate the rotten roots and open the way for recovery from a grim fate.”

—Noam Chomsky

“A powerful and searing account of a devastating atrocity. Gibler’s innovative style takes us on a compelling journey through a landscape of terror and brutality against those whose only crime was to demand the freedom to think.”

—Brad Evans is a columnist on violence for the New York Times and LA Review of Books

“We are fortunate to now have in English, John Gibler’s courageous account and oral history of the 2014 atrocity in Mexico in which 43 students vanished from the face of the earth and remain absent, while six more people (three of them students) were found dead, one of them mutilated. The US ‘war on drugs’ has unleashed decades of unimaginable and hideous terrorism in Mexico, just as the ‘war on terror’ is doing in the Middle East. The cruel viciousness of Ayotzinapa, with the 48 families of all the disappeared, murdered, and critically wounded students insisting on answers from the Mexican government, opens the door to a powerful resistance movement, which also requires U.S. citizens to insist on ending the US war against the Mexican people, which began in the 1820s and has never abated.”

—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States