Missing Mexico student's dad: 'The government is waging war against our children'

Emiliano Navarrete is the father of 17-year-old José Angel Navarrete, one of 43 Mexican students who disappeared in the southern city of Iguala after they were attacked by corrupt municipal police on 26 September.

The students, from a radical teacher training college in the town of Ayotzinapa, are believed to have been killed after they were handed over to a local drug gang known as Guerreros Unidos.

Seventy-nine people have since been arrested in connection with the case, including the mayor of Iguala, who was closely linked to Guerreros Unidos and allegedly ordered police to attack the students because he feared they would disrupt an event to promote his wife’s political ambitions.

Federal investigators say that the students were likely to be among a group of people massacred and incinerated in a rubbish tip outside the neighbouring town of Cocula.

The case has provoked protests across Mexico and led to a slump in the popularity of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has met with the parents once, five weeks after their children vanished.

José Angel – known by his family as Pepe – had entered the Ayotzinapa rural teacher training college this year.

It happened on Friday night. Pepe visited us two days before, and that day I gave him a hug and I said: “Son, wherever you are, I will always find you.” I don’t know what made me say those words. Now I am beginning to understand.

The night he disappeared, his mother called him. It was about 10.30. He answered and said they were in Iguala and the police were attacking them. He said a friend had been hit in the face. I grabbed the phone and I could hear the kids shouting and screaming and I told him to escape and to hide – and then the call was cut off.

The next day I went to Iguala with three other parents. When we got to the prosecutor’s office, there were kids outside and inside, but my son wasn’t there. We spent the afternoon searching the streets of Iguala, but he wasn’t there. Other parents went to the prison because we’d been told the children had been arrested, but they weren’t there either.

On the Sunday we went back and visited all the little towns near Iguala, but we found nothing. Lots of people wouldn’t even talk to us. We kept looking on our own until the federal police came from Mexico City about two weeks later and we started looking with them as well. I still go almost every day. To wait for the government to give us information is to wait for nothing.

We have had meetings with the government, but they have not produced results. When they told us about the rubbish dump, we knew it wasn’t true right from the start.

And as far as I am concerned, their theatre is very cheap. It just isn’t possible to burn so many people on a huge fire and there not to be more damage. The idea that they then smashed up the bones and put them in bags and dumped them in the river also just doesn’t make sense. If somebody wants to kills somebody, they just do it and dump the body.

The protest marches have made me stronger, and maybe this will help things change. Because the government is waging war against our children, and they don’t even seem ashamed that other countries are seeing it. They talk about dialogue, but maybe what they understand by dialogue is to open fire on young people.

They attacked a bunch of harmless kids. The world should know and judge the Mexican government for that. I am a Mexican and I am ashamed by the attitudes and actions of my government. And they say they have caught the people who did it and they can’t get them to say where they took our children – while we run around looking for them.

I ask myself why they did it all the time, and I just don’t understand. Who were they trying to hurt? Who are they trying to protect by not telling us the truth?

The meeting with the president was so disappointing. I expected some kind of comfort, like a father embracing his child, which is what a president should do. But it was cold. He was cold.

We are in exactly the same place we were two months ago. And people feel impotent and angry for good reason. The president has to take responsibility for the government’s criminal acts in Iguala. The army was there and it did nothing. The federal government knew what kind of government there was in Iguala. It knew Iguala was a clandestine cemetery – of course it knew.