The right to asylum has been enshrined in US law since the 1950s. It’s meant to provide a safe haven for people fleeing violence and government persecution. 

Laura Ascencio Bautista and her family have faced both in Mexico, where her brother Benjamin disappeared along with 42 others in 2014 after police stormed a bus from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.

In the years since, violence in her home state of Guerrero left Bautista desperate. She heard asylum was created for people like her. So she traveled north, headed for the perceived safety of the United States.

“I was told that if I went to the US border and told my family’s story and how it’s not safe back home, the United States could protect me,” she said.

Despite all the political hand-wringing about a crisis at the border, many Americans don’t understand what’s driving so many people from Mexico and other countries to come to the US in the first place. This week, Reveal senior reporter and producer Anayansi Diaz-Cortes takes us to a part of Mexico that many families are leaving behind—a place where fear is a part of daily life—and unwinds US policies that helped trigger the cycle of violence and migration that continues to this day. 

Dig Deeper

Listen: After Ayotzinapa (Reveal and the National Security Archive) 

Read and explore: Declassified US documents about the Dirty War and Lucio Cabañas (National Security Archive) 

Read: On the 10th Anniversary of the Ayotzinapa Case, Three Key Tasks for Mexico’s New Government (Washington Office on Latin America)

Read: Ten Years After Ayotzinapa, Government Impunity Stains the Pursuit of Justice (El Faro)

Read: The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa at Ten Years (National Security Archive)

Read: The Cienfuegos Affair: Inside the Case that Upended America’s Drug War (ProPublica)

Explore: Bajo La Bota

Credits

National Security Archive logo

Reporter and producer: Anayansi Diaz-Cortes | Editor: Taki Telonidis | Production assistance: Steven Rascón | National Security Archive partners: Kate Doyle, Tom Blanton, and Claire Dorfman | Fact checkers: Artis Curiskis and Melvis Acosta | Legal review: James Chadwick | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and by Reveal listeners.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson.  
Cristina Bautis…:[foreign language 00:00:08].  
Al Letson:It’s October 2020 and Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes is driving up into the mountains of Southern Mexico.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:We’ve been driving for eight hours now.  
Al Letson:She arrives at a house in a tiny, sleepy village, so high up in the Sierra-  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:[Foreign language 00:00:29].  
Al Letson:… it feels like she’s floating in the sky.  
 [foreign language 00:00:38].  
 She’s here to meet the Bautista family.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:[foreign language 00:00:41].  
Al Letson:She’s welcomed with the smell of fresh salsa, flowers and friendly faces.  
Laura Ascencio …:[foreign language 00:00:48].  
Mayrani Bautist…:[foreign language 00:00:48].  
Al Letson:Two young women are chatting in front of a glorious view of deep green mountain peaks, but Anayansi can’t tell if they’re related.  
 “We always get that question because we look nothing alike,” says one of the women, Mayrani.  
 “We’re sisters,” says Laura. “We may not look the same, but our foolishness is the same and our tragedies are also the same.”  
Laura Ascencio …:[foreign language 00:01:26].  
Al Letson:Another thing they share is a loving obsession with talking about their brother, Benjamín. Their shared silliness, how his fashion sense was the talk of the town, his dance moves, his dreams to become a teacher, his voice and how much they miss hearing it.  
 Benjamín disappeared 10 years ago this past week. At the time, he was a freshman at a teacher’s college in Mexico. He was with a group of students who came under attack on a stormy September night in 2014. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. The attack on the students became a symbol of the country’s national tragedy of missing persons. Now, at more than 100,000.  
 In 2022, Anayansi in partnership with the National Security Archive led a three-part investigation into the case called After Ayotzinapa. Since then, she’s kept in close touch with the Bautista family.  
Cristina Bautis…:[foreign language 00:00:33].  
Al Letson:Last summer, Anayansi got a troubled voice memo from the mother, Cristina.  
Cristina Bautis…:[foreign language 00:02:43].  
Al Letson:Cristina, who goes by Doña Cristi tells Anayansi that her daughter Laura fled the village, headed north towards the US Southern border, and is at a shelter in Tijuana with her three daughters.  
 Laura joined hundreds of thousands of people from Mexico and other countries seeking asylum in the US.  
 This election season, the border and immigration are divisive issues for Democrats and Republicans.  
Donald Trump:She is a radical left Marxist. She wants open borders, she wants our country to be open to the world’s criminals so they can come in and rape and pillage and do whatever they have to do.  
Kamala Harris:I believe we have laws that have to be followed and enforced, that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally, and there should be consequences.  
Al Letson:Despite all of the political hand-wringing around the crisis at the border, many Americans don’t understand what’s behind it, what’s driving so many people from Mexico and other countries to come to the US in the first place.  
 Today, we look at a part of Mexico that many families are leaving behind, a place where fear is a part of daily life. It’s also a place where decades ago, US policies helped trigger a cycle of violence and migration that continues to this day.  
 Anayansi Diaz-Cortes has our story.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Almost three months after learning that Laura’s at the border, I decide to make the ten-hour drive to Tijuana to see her. I invite her to the hotel where I’m staying. She’s anxious to tell me why she’s here.  
 She tells me, she needs to get to Al Otro Lado, the US side with her daughters. She’s nervous and scattered, a shell of the jovial person I met in Mexico. She holds her belly tight and cracks a smile when she looks down at it. She’s pregnant.  
 Her mother, Doña Cristi is here too. She’s traveled 20 hours by bus from her village in Southern Mexico because she’s been worried sick.  
 “My daughter has been waiting for months,” Doña Cristi says, and Laura’s baby is reaching the eight-month mark. Laura tells me she came to the border because she heard a rumor that if she told her family story about how it’s not safe back home in the state of Guerrero, it would be easy to get asylum.  
 That right to asylum has been enshrined in US law since the 1950s. It’s meant to provide a safe haven for people fleeing violence and government persecution. Laura and her family have faced both.  
 Laura and Doña Cristi tell me stories about the kinds of things happening all over Guerrero: shootings, kidnappings, disappearances. Laura tells me she seen suspicious looking men sitting in cars parked outside her home. One time, two men entered the house and approached her daughters to try to lure them away. When they wouldn’t go, the men grabbed the youngest one. Laura started screaming. Luckily, the men left.  
 “Going to the police is not a good option,” Doña Cristi tells me. More often than not, she says, the police are part of the criminal groups. That’s been the case for years in this part of Mexico. It was the case a decade ago when Laura’s brother, Benjamín and the other students came under attack on September 26th, 2014. Benjamín was a freshman at the Ayotzinapa Teachers College. That night, he was riding with about 100 other students on buses. Suddenly, the buses are stopped by police, who without warning, pull out their guns and open fire.  
 “We are students, we are not armed,” they shout. This was recorded by survivors of that night. One of Benjamín’s classmates is shot in the head and the students plead for an ambulance. Instead of helping, the police pulled dozens of students off the buses, load them onto pickup trucks and drive off. By the end of the night, six people are dead and the 43 who were taken away never came back. Tens of thousands of people march in the streets and Doña Cristi becomes a leader of the movement calling for justice.  
Speaker 6:[foreign language 00:08:25].  
Speaker 7:[foreign language 00:08:27].  
Speaker 6:[foreign language 00:08:30].  
Speaker 7:[foreign language 00:08:33].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The government promises to find the students and prosecute those responsible for the crime. But instead, it delivers a flawed investigation that’s soon discredited. The people who were supposed to expose the truth were instead covering it up by planting evidence, falsifying documents, and using torture to force people to confess.  
Speaker 8:Viva Mexico.  
Speaker 7:Viva.  
Speaker 8:Viva Mexico.  
Speaker 7:Viva Mexico.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Mexicans elect a new president in 2018 who soon after taking office, launches a new investigation. But three years later, it’s abruptly dismantled after the prosecutor and his team uncover evidence that high-ranking government officials and members of the military were involved in the attack on the students.  
 Doña Cristi and other families feel abandoned and betrayed by their government. In the meantime, the situation in their home state, Guerrero spirals into more violence.  
Speaker 11:[foreign language 00:09:53].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:In 2023, the government counted more than 1600 homicides in Guerrero. There are bloody shootouts, local crime groups vying for control of the drug trade and territory. This is the reality that Laura wanted to leave behind. Guerrero had only gotten worse since Benjamín’s disappearance. She feared for her daughters and now, fourth child was on the way.  
 That’s when she heard the rumor, the United States would protect her and her daughters under asylum law. They would all go to Tijuana and make their case at the border. “It felt like a good option and it would be fast, easy. Just two weeks and we’d be safe,” she tells me.  
 But when she gets to the border, she finds a very different reality. There isn’t an office where she can go make an asylum appointment or fill out a form or speak to an actual human. Instead, she has to use this phone app that the Biden administration created for people seeking asylum. It’s called the CBP One app, short for Customs and Border Protection. Every day, Laura has to submit her request for an appointment, but nothing, just an automated reply that tells her to try the next day and the next.  
 The system is accepting 1,000 asylum appointments each day, but there are many times that number of people making requests. Laura keeps trying. Weeks go by. In the meantime, she and her daughters are staying in a shelter that she describes as a military encampment. She hates it. The four of them share two beds.  
 She tells me they’re fed very little and outside food is not allowed, and she says they’re searched every day. Guards check shirts, bras, underwear. After four months, there’s no end in sight. It seems like Mexicans are just not getting asylum. The girls especially are having a really hard time. To them, it feels like they’re in jail, which is why the family has made a difficult decision. Doña Cristi will take her granddaughters back to Guerrero and Laura will stay at the border.  
 On Thanksgiving weekend 2023, I meet them at the Tijuana International Airport at the food court before Cristi and the girls take their flight, Yolsitlali, who’s 13, Johanna, who’s 9 and Cristinita, 7.  
Laura Ascencio …:[foreign language 00:13:18].  
Cristinita:[foreign language 00:13:19].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:That’s Cristinita. Laura’s taken the microphone out of my hand and is now interviewing her kids.  
Laura Ascencio …:You said you didn’t want to stay here, that you wanted to go back to Guerrero, that you miss it. What do you miss?  
Cristinita:My cousins.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Laura turns to [inaudible 00:13:51] to ask how she’s feeling.  
Speaker 13:It was a long time in the shelter, four months, and we couldn’t even chew gum.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Then, little Cristinita puts her hand on her mother’s belly.  
Cristinita:“I’m going to miss you a lot,” she tells her mother’s belly. We’re going to separate now.  
Laura Ascencio …:[foreign language 00:14:28].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Laura, teary-eyed turns to hug her mother. “They’re in good hands,” Doña Cristi says.  
Cristina Bautis…:You don’t need to cry, I’ll take care of them. I’ll cook, make sure they eat. I’ll take good care of them.  
 [foreign language 00:14:53].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:She hugs Laura. The air is filled with heartbreak. All of them embraced in a deep group hug with Laura’s belly as the center of all the love.  
 It’s time to go. Doña Cristi rushes her granddaughters to the security line.  
Laura Ascencio …:[foreign language 00:15:20].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Laura waves until they pass security and are no longer in sight.  
Al Letson:Coming up next, we go to the Mexican state of Guerrero and look at how decades of violence there are connected to US foreign policy.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Doña Cristi is back in Guerrero with her three granddaughters.  
Granddaughters:[Spanish 00:00:12].  
Al Letson:Hello, everyone. We are free from the shelter, they tell Reveal’s Anayansi Diaz-Cortes in a voice memo. The girls are in school and Doña Cristi is trying to get them into a routine, but it’s not easy. She tells Anayansi that every few days the teacher calls her into the school to talk about Yolsitlali, Laura’s eldest daughter.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:00:38].  
Al Letson:Yol, lover of K-pop, bubble gum, and the coolest big sister ever, is on strike.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:00:51].  
Al Letson:She’s agitated and she stopped talking in class. Yol tells her teachers that she misses her mom, who’s still at the US border, hoping to get asylum. And then there’s the stress from what’s happening all around them. Violence and extortion by criminal gangs have ruined Guerrero’s economy. People struggle to earn a living, including Doña Cristi. She sells earrings and hats she makes from palm leaves to pay the bills, and she’s still a leader in the movement calling for justice for the 43 Ayotzinapa students.  
 Even though it’s been 10 years, she is determined to find out who was behind the disappearance of her son. But the violence in Guerrero began long before the attack on the students. And if you dig into the history, you’ll discover that for decades this place was considered a source of trouble by Mexico’s government and by the US, a place that bred leftist guerrillas and the drug trade. The response by both governments was to declare a war on these problems with Washington helping to create policies and provide funding to Mexico’s military to stamp them out. That response created its own problems, fueling instability and driving migration to the border. Anayansi Diaz-Cortes explains.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Kate Doyle, our partner in the Ayotzinapa project, has spent decades investigating human rights abuses in Mexico, especially during the Cold War.  
Kate Doyle:I’m a senior analyst at the National Security Archive. The archive uses the Freedom of Information Act to obtain declassified documents from US secret archives, records of the CIA, of the State Department, the embassies, the Pentagon, to help uncover hidden histories about US policy.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Those records show that back in the 1970s, the US government was worried, you might even say obsessed, with a man most have never even heard of.  
Kate Doyle:Lucio Cabañas.  
Lucio Cabanas:[Spanish 00:03:02].  
Kate Doyle:Lucio Cabañas, of course, is the most well-known graduate of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher Training School.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The same school, of course, that Benjamin, Doña Cristi’s son, attended.  
Kate Doyle:Probably the most famous guerrilla leader in Mexico, one of the CIA cables called him. The US intelligence reports on Cabañas they did recognize that he posed an internal security threat, a threat to the status quo.  
Lucio Cabañas:[Spanish 00:03:37].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:For Lucio Cabañas, the status quo was a Mexico dominated by what he called the rich class. Everyone else lived in misery.  
Kate Doyle:He sought to represent the poorest, most neglected, abandoned communities of Guerrero campesino workers, indigenous communities that did not have clinics. They didn’t have medicine. They didn’t have schools.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:A movement emerged in the late 1960s. El Partido de Los Pobres, the Party of the Poor. Literacy, getting rid of poverty, this was their rallying cry. Cabañas and his movement became legendary in Guerrero. Decades later, he was a hero for Doña Cristi’s son, Benjamin.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:04:25].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:When Benjamin was in college, he’d say [Spanish 00:04:34], his struggle is our struggle too. Doña Cristi now sees herself as continuing that struggle. When Benjamin was a boy, she hardly spoke Spanish, just her native language Nahuatl. After his disappearance, she learned to read and write in Spanish so she could protest.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:04:55].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The government needs to know that we won’t be silenced. We must speak in their language so that they know that we will not shut up. Cabañas and his fighters were leftists and communists, but they were different from other movements. They didn’t identify with the Soviet Union or Cuba.  
Kate Doyle:They were homegrown phenomena that came directly out of the challenges of their lives in the places where they lived and the long legacy of repression and poverty that they survived.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:But for Mexico’s government and Washington, they were a menace. They had to go.  
Kate Doyle:United States national security policy in Mexico was interested in crushing whatever forms of communism existed, and it supported the efforts of the Mexican government to destroy Lucio Cabañas and his army of the poor.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:With help from the US, Mexico’s military established a huge presence in Guerrero by the early ’70s. They went after leftists in what came to be called the Dirty War. Their tactics included surveillance, torture, killings, and disappearances.  
Lucio Cabañas:[Spanish 00:06:14].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Who is giving helicopters to the government to quash our revolution?  
Lucio Cabañas:[Spanish 00:06:27].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:[Spanish 00:06:30], meaning the US. In 1974 the Mexican military sent thousands of troops into the mountains of Guerrero.  
Kate Doyle:Troops that eventually did kill Cabañas. They also went into the town, the village of Atoyac, where Cabañas is from, and killed or disappeared dozens, up to 100, of his family members. If you had the last name Cabañas, you were a target.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The killing of Lucio Cabañas triggered more violence by the military in Guerrero, some of it incredibly cruel.  
Kate Doyle:The military would take their captured, suspected subversives to a base just outside of Acapulco in Guerrero called Piedra Cuesta, and they would assassinate them or execute them and then fly their bodies in planes out over the ocean and drop them into the water. So this act of forcible disappearance was something that did not start with the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Doña Cristi remembers hearing about the dirty war.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:07:41].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:And the helicopters. In the days after the attack on her son and the other students, a rumor was spreading. An echo of the Dirty War. Doña Cristi tells me that the families were told.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:07:56].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:You can’t find the students because the army took them away in helicopters and threw them into the sea.  
Doña Cristi:[Spanish 00:08:09].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:I’ve been reporting on the case of the 43 students for years now, and yes, I’d heard the name Lucio Cabañas, and I knew about Mexico’s Dirty War. But diving into this history and connecting these dots makes me realize the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students is part of a much older story, a story that includes a government policy of terror and a justice system that’s broken. Other Latin American countries have reckoned with their dirty wars. Generals and presidents were held accountable and sent to prison. Not in Mexico.  
Kate Doyle:Nobody was ever punished in Mexico for disappearing people in the 1970s. Nobody was ever punished in the military for torturing their prisoners or for executing the students. The use of these tools to repress and to frighten and to terrorize have never gone away.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:In Mexico, the dirty war against the leftists ended in the 1980s. But using the military to eliminate threats through violence and repression didn’t stop. This strategy was lauded, enabled and funded by the United States. And it was used as a blueprint to fight another war, one that continues today, the war on drugs. As early as the 1960s, the US saw the poppy in cannabis coming from Mexico as a problem.  
Kate Doyle:And the United States all the way back then began to give the Mexican government, and specifically the military, all kinds of weaponry and planes and helicopters in order to destroy the growing reduction of drugs in Mexico.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:And in the decades that follow, Mexico and Guerrero specifically become home to a bustling industry of weed and heroin production. Then in the ’90s, cocaine takes over. 70% of the cocaine coming into the US is trafficked through Mexico. The drug boom brings violence and death. By 2006, the number of drug-related homicides is more than 2000. By 2008, it’s double that. There are turf wars with bazookas and grenades, bodies strung up in public spaces. There are even beheadings. Regular citizens are terrorized on a daily basis. It’s a full-blown national crisis.  
Speaker 14:President Felipe Calderon tours an army base in the border city of Mexicali. He has deployed 45,000 troops to 18 Mexican states in an aggressive offensive against the cartels.  
President Filip…:We are kicking them and kicking them really hard.  
Stephanie Brewer:President Felipe Calderon came into power in Mexico, and he came into office declaring an all out, frontal war and pledging to deploy the military to defeat the cartels and reduce violence.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Stephanie Brewer is from the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and advocacy group that pushes for human rights in the Americas. And this, for many officials in the US, was music to their ears.  
President Georg…:Mr. President, welcome.  
President Filip…:Thank you.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:At the end of his administration, President George W. Bush meets with Felipe Calderon to celebrate a historic moment of military cooperation.  
President Georg…:The battle that’s taking place in Mexico, and I want our fellow citizens to understand that this man, he will not allow his country to be taken over by narco traffickers.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Their agreement is called the Merida Initiative.  
President Georg…:Adios.  
President Filip…:Thank you.  
President Georg…:Good job.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The hope was that the Merida Initiative would shut down the drug trade and stop the violence. First, the US would send billions of dollars to the Mexican military to fight the war on drugs, and there’d be increased collaboration between Mexico and US agencies like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the CIA. The game plan was simple.  
Stephanie Brewer:Capturing, extraditing and targeting so-called drug kingpins, with the idea of cutting the heads off of these criminal organizations.  
Speaker 15:He was the world’s most wanted drug trafficker. For decades, the ruthless Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán destroyed millions of lives.  
Speaker 16:One of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords has been captured by soldiers. Authorities say, Hector-  
Speaker 17:Edgar Valdez Villarreal was once a high school football player in Laredo, Texas. Now he’s accused of trafficking a ton of cocaine each month in gruesome-  
Speaker 16:Arrested in Mexico, wearing a filthy singlet over a middle-aged paunch, El Chapo looked more like El Cheapo.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The headlines made it sound like the war was going well, but in reality, rather than weakening and causing the implosion or collapse of criminal organizations, it caused splintering of structures that were more likely to turn against local populations and start committing more predatory crimes.  
 Stephanie describes it like decapitating Hydra, the nine-headed monster that terrorized people in Greek mythology. For each head cut, two grow in its place, and these new heads are even more violent.  
Speaker 18:With 10,000 plus drug-related murders this year, he views his soldiers as his best hope in a blood-soaked clash that critics on both sides of the border are starting to call unwinnable.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Unwinnable. By most accounts, the Merida Initiative failed homicide rates doubled, then tripled. In 2018 they spiked to more than 22,000. As the drug trade splintered and spread, it took over Guerrero’s economy. People struggled to survive.  
Stephanie Brewer:They don’t have the ability to live and work and feed their family, and/or mixed in with that, they’re facing violence, they’re facing displacement, they’re facing extortion. And this multiplicity of factors has contributed to migration as well that you see at the US border and people largely seeking asylum in the United States. There have been hundreds of thousands of people displaced.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:For many who chose to stay. One of the easiest ways make a living is the drug trade, growing poppies, which are, of course, a base for opioids. And that has led to Guerrero also being a focus of anti-drug repressive or militarized activities by state actors over several decades.  
 But the people carrying out these militarized activities were not all trying to take down the cartels. Many police, politicians, and members of the military ended up working in collusion with the cartels and getting a cut of the profits. Stephanie and other experts say the US government knew this was going on, but turned a blind eye. It didn’t want to risk the DEA and other agencies getting kicked out of Mexico.  
Stephanie Brewer:The US government knew that this wasn’t a case of good guys versus bad guys, state against criminals. It was a case of criminals also working within the state or state authorities having relationships with criminals. A really interesting example of this is the case of General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was the head of Mexico’s defense ministry.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Salvador Cienfuegos was one of Mexico’s chief architects of the war on drugs and a strategic ally for the US government. Washington looked at him as a golden boy and even decorated him with a prestigious Legion of Merit Award. Then came October 15, 2020.  
Speaker 18:An unusual arrest at LAX last night. The DEA arrested one of Mexico’s top generals, Salvador Cienfuegos. Cienfuegos was arrested on drug trafficking and money laundering charges.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Mexico’s defense minister, a chief collaborator in the war on drugs, stood accused of secretly working with the cartels, who knew him as El Padrino, the godfather. Suddenly, the house of cards holding up the drug war is put on display. Cienfuegos is charged with importing and distributing heroin, cocaine, and other drugs.  
Speaker 18:An official, General Cienfuegos, has a hearing this afternoon and is expected to be transferred to New York to face the charges against him.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:A month after his arrest in Los Angeles, I’m in Mexico with Kate Doyle when she starts reading me a letter that was released that morning by the US government.  
Kate Doyle:And it says, “The government respectfully submits this motion requesting that the court dismiss the above indictment without prejudice.”  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The Drug Enforcement Agency had arrested Cienfuegos, but now the Trump administration, through Attorney General William Barr, is requesting that the charges be dismissed and the general sent back to Mexico. For Kate, who follows US-Mexico relations closely, the whole thing is nuts.  
Kate Doyle:It was unprecedented in the sense that ministers of defense don’t normally get arrested, from Mexico or anywhere. He was a very, very, very senior officer, who, by the way, was a very close ally. So when the arrest happened, it was a bombshell. But this decision of the US government to drop the indictment and reverse its position is a nuclear bomb. I’ve never heard of anything like this in my life.  
Al Letson:Coming up next, why the US decided to do an about-face and what ultimately happens to General Cienfuegos. You’re listening to Reveal.  
Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. One month after General Salvador Cienfuegos was arrested in Los Angeles by the DEA and charged with trafficking drugs, Attorney General William Barr issues a statement, quote, “In the interest of demonstrating our united front against all forms of criminality, the US Department of Justice has made the decision to seek dismissal of the US criminal charges against former Secretary Cienfuegos so that he may be investigated and, if appropriate, charged under Mexican law.” Cienfuegos is sent back to Mexico, where after a brief investigation, he’s exonerated.  
Speaker 19:[Spanish 00:00:51].  
Al Letson:On the face of it, releasing a high-profile partner in the war on drugs after he’s accused of colluding with narco-traffickers doesn’t make sense, but as Anayansi Diaz-Cortes explains, William Barr’s decision was not just about the war on drugs. It was also about another war the Trump administration was fighting at the time, the war against immigration.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:When Donald Trump became president in 2017, General Salvador Cienfuegos was Mexico’s Secretary of Defense. Right after Cienfuegos left office, the Trump administration and the Mexican government put in place a controversial policy at the US southern border.  
Stephanie Brewe…:Which ironically was named… The official name is the Migrant Protection Protocols, but it was quite the contrary.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:That’s Stephanie Brewer again from the Washington Office on Latin America. The policy came to be known as Remain in Mexico, and the idea behind it, she explains, was to make it much more difficult to claim asylum.  
Stephanie Brewe…:Migrants who asked for asylum were forced to wait on the Mexican side of the border while their asylum claim was being processed in the US, while they were waiting for their court dates, measures that essentially resulted in expulsions of people in a way that denied their right to seek asylum.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:People who wanted to claim asylum now had to wait on the Mexican side of the border for an appointment with US immigration. But for Trump, there were still too many people showing up at the border. So in early 2019, he put more pressure on Mexico threatening its economy.  
Speaker 20:Overnight President Trump tweeted, “The United States will impose tariffs on Mexico until the flow of migrants stops.”  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:It would start off with a 5% tariff.  
Speaker 20:The tariffs will then increase by 5% every month until October, at which point they will remain at 25% indefinitely.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Mexico got the message. President Lopez Obrador sends thousands of troops to Mexico’s southern border to try and prevent migrants from coming up from Central America and also to the northern border with the US to turn them back or put them in shelters. Just like during the dirty war and the war on drugs, the US and Mexico send in the military. Soldiers are used to keep migrants out of the US.  
Stephanie Brewe…:Military forces who are not trained and designed to be a first respondent for traumatized families or for refugees. There’s no reason that that should be a military role.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Within a year, there are dozens of complaints and accusations against the military and National Guard. Migrants are detained, tortured and worse.  
Stephanie Brewe…:Cases of arbitrary executions, lethal force, killing migrants in Mexico by different parts of the Mexican military.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:It was harsh, but the military’s clampdown worked. The number of migrants crossing into the US went way down. More than a year later in the fall of 2020, Cienfuegos was arrested in LA. By then he was out of office, but this was still a huge embarrassment for the Mexican government, which complained to US officials. Here’s Kate Doyle again.  
Kate Doyle:They talk and the Mexicans say, “This is not happening. And if it is happening, we’re going to change the rules so that you guys can’t operate in here.”  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:It was clear that convicting a big fish like Cienfuegos would sour US relations with the Mexican government and potentially jeopardize their cooperation on immigration policy. Mexico can unleash chaos at the border by telling its military to no longer hold migrants back. So Washington decided to release the big fish.  
 Since then, the Mexican military has played an even bigger role in containing migration. They operate many of the shelters on the Mexican side of the border that are holding thousands of migrants, like the one in Tijuana where Laura Bautista and her daughter stayed when I visited them last fall.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:05:08].  
Speaker 21:[Spanish 00:05:09].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Visitors aren’t allowed in, but Laura’s able to meet me outside. She hops in my car and we drive around.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:05:21].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The shelter is a huge compound, about 45 minutes outside of Tijuana. When I told Laura I wanted to check it out, she said, “There’s nothing to see.” And she’s right. But what you can’t see is more telling. The shelter sits on a lonely road and the grounds are completely sealed off by razor wire fence. In the distance, I see what looks like a military barracks. There are security checkpoints and floodlights all over the place.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:05:53].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:It’s past sundown. Laura tells me it’s too late for her to go back in. Doña Cristi and the girls are staying at a hotel in Tijuana. So I drive Laura there to spend the night. If Laura had tried to get asylum a decade ago when Benjamin disappeared, she would’ve stood a better chance. In 2014, about 70,000 people were granted asylum. By the time Trump left office, those numbers were much lower and they’ve stayed low under President Biden. By 2022, the number dropped by nearly two-thirds to roughly 25,000. From the beginning, the Biden administration has taken a hard line on immigration. Six months into office, he sent Vice President Kamala Harris to meet with Mexican and Guatemalan officials about the migration issue.  
Kamala Harris:I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border. Do not come. Do not come.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:That has continued to be the message from the Biden White House, which has put in place a series of new restrictions to block the path to asylum. Stephanie says people at the border are left hanging, asking…  
Stephanie Brewe…:“What is the way that I can get protection? Who can protect me? Where do I knock? Where do I apply?” And right now, the opportunities are extremely limited.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:In December of 2023 with her due date a little more than a week away, Laura sends me a recording of her baby’s heartbeat. She’s decided to abandon her asylum request. She leaves Tijuana and gives birth to a fourth girl and names her Zianya, which means eternal in the Nahuatl language. Life back home continues to be difficult, and this past spring, Doña Cristi has a scare.  
Cristina Bautis…:[Spanish 00:08:14].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:She and other parents of missing Ayotzinapa students go to Mexico City to hold a sit-in to put pressure on the government to continue to investigate the case.  
Speaker 22:[Spanish 00:08:30].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Things get violent when protesters ram a pickup truck into one of the entrance doors to the National Palace, where the president is holding his daily press conference.  
Speaker 22:[Spanish 00:08:47].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:The government uses tear gas to break up the crowd. For the families, it’s a reminder of the early days a decade ago when they were violently targeted by the previous Mexican administration. This year, there are presidential elections in both the US and Mexico.  
Speaker 12:[Spanish 00:09:12].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Claudia Sheinbaum will be the first woman president in Mexico. So far, she’s said very little about border policy. On the US side, we don’t know who will be the next president, but in August, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris vowed to enforce laws that tightened migration into the United States. Stephanie Brewer expects Harris priorities will be like President Biden’s.  
Stephanie Brewe…:An overwhelming focus and prioritization of saying to Mexico, “What we want is for you to do everything possible to reduce migration to the US border. That’s our number one ask.”  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:And if Trump is reelected, he’s promising an even harsher crackdown.  
Donald Trump:They’re all now in the United States and they’re now taking over cities. It’s like an invasion from within. And we’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country.  
Stephanie Brewe…:And even proposals for US military action in Mexico. So policies that take an even more extreme militaristic effort to prioritize detention and deportation and blocking migration and sealing the border at a time when actually a heightened level of people in the region need humanitarian protection.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Stephanie sees the United States is closing its doors at a time when more and more people are in danger and looking to the US as a safe haven.  
Stephanie Brewe…:I think a lot of people in the US, they perhaps don’t understand or they wonder, “Why are all of these people coming? Why don’t they stay in their own country?” Or perhaps they think, “Well, they’re coming here because they’re looking for better jobs.” And what they may not understand is actually the close connection between the reason for the displacement of a lot of those families and policies enacted or promoted by the US government itself.  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Earlier this month, I decide to check in on Laura and we arrange a video call. She’s back in Guerrero, [Spanish 00:11:35], with Doña Cristi and her daughters and the baby Zianya.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:11:41].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:When I call, Zianya is dozing off, but immediately perks up. The TV is on, but all four girls have turned away and are peeking into the video call. Yol immediately grabs the baby, puts her on her lap and bounces her.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:12:06].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Zianya shows off two tiny teeth.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:12:10].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Laura tells me about the day she reunited with her three older daughters. It was late, 1:00 AM, when she got to the house. The girls were sleeping, but they’d made a sign for her.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:12:21].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:It said, “We missed you. Welcome home.”  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:12:30].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Johanna, now 10, hears her mom telling the story and jumps into view.  
Johanna:[Spanish 00:12:40].  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:12:42].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:To say that when she saw her mother, she cried.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:12:49].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Laura tells me she’s shocked at how much the girls grew. Even their voices changed. Doña Cristi lives with them but isn’t home when I call. The 10th anniversary of Benjamin’s disappearance has her busier than ever. On this day, she’s in Mexico City trying to meet with incoming President Sheinbaum. I asked Laura about being back and if she has plans to ask for asylum in the future. She puts the phone off speaker and video.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:13:29].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:“There are no plans,” she tells me. “Right now I must stay focused on raising my daughters and the baby.” She isn’t willing to put them through that again, even though everything is falling apart in Guerrero, in Tijuana, they were falling apart.  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:13:55].  
Speaker 23:[Spanish 00:13:59].  
Laura Ascencio …:[Spanish 00:13:59].  
Anayansi Diaz-C…:Bye.  
Al Letson:To hear our original series, After Ayotzinapa, and to learn more about Mexico’s Dirty War, go to revealnews.org. Our story was reported and produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, with production help from Steven Rascon. Taki Telonidis edited the show. Thanks to our partners at the National Security Archive, Kate Doyle, Tom Blanton and Claire Dorfman. Artis Curiskis and Melvis Acosta are our fact checkers. Legal review by James Chadwick. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Score and sound, designed by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Camerado, Lightning. Support for Reveal’s provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story.  
Speaker 24:[Spanish 00:15:28].  
Crowd:[Spanish 00:15:30].  
Speaker 24:[Spanish 00:15:33].  
Crowd:[Spanish 00:15:36].  
Speaker 24:[Spanish 00:15:40].  
Crowd:[Spanish 00:15:43].  

Anayansi Diaz-Cortes is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. She most notably spearheaded After Ayotzinapa, a gripping investigative series that examines the mysterious disappearance of 43 Mexican college students in 2014. The project earned her an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and was named among the New York Times’ Best Podcasts of 2022.

With a commitment to shedding light on critical issues, Anayansi’s storytelling spans a wide spectrum, from exposing wage theft and the dangers of predatory online gaming to unraveling the complexities of the criminal justice system in Mississippi and the challenges of navigating high school life amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Her distinctive approach combines emotional depth with first-person narratives, captivating audiences while unearthing consequential truths.

Steven Rascón is the production manager for Reveal. He has also produced the KQED podcast On Our Watch: New Folsom, a serial investigation into the death of two whistleblowers inside California’s most dangerous prison. Their reporting has aired on NPR stations such as Capital Public Radio, WHYY, and KCRW. He also helped produce the Peabody-nominated Reveal podcast series Mississippi Goddam. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Artis Curiskis is an assistant producer at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Previously, he was an editorial fellow at Mother Jones. Before that, he produced and reported the Peabody-nominated series The COVID Tracking Project podcast with Reveal and led data reporting efforts with The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. He was also an artist-in-residence at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and a Thomas J. Watson fellow. You can reach him at acuriskis@revealnews.org.

Nikki Frick is a copy editor for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and WashingtonPost.com. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for the Center for Investigative Reporting. She is originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the wellbeing of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care, and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs, and cat.

Jim Briggs III is a senior sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. He joined the Center for Investigative Reporting in 2014. Jim and his team shape the sound of the weekly public radio show and podcast through original music, mixing, and editing. In a career devoted to elevating high-impact journalism, Jim’s work in radio, podcasting, and television has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, IRE, Gerald Loeb, and Third Coast awards, as well as a News and Documentary Emmy and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound. He has lent his ears to a range of podcasts and radio programs including Marketplace, Selected Shorts, Death, Sex & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, NPR’s Ask Me Another, Radiolab, Freakonomics Radio, WNYC’s live music performance show Soundcheck, and The 7 and Field Trip from the Washington Post. His film credits include PBS’s American Experience: Walt Whitman, the 2012 Tea Party documentary Town Hall, and The Supreme Court miniseries. Before that, he worked on albums with artists such as R.E.M., Paul Simon, and Kelly Clarkson at NYC’s legendary Hit Factory Recording Studios. Jim is based in western Massachusetts with his family, cats, and just enough musical instruments to do some damage.

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer, and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the music, editing, and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, George Polk, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast, and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured internationally as a DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He also worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, as well as for clients such as Marvel, MasterClass, and Samsung. His credits also include NPR’s 51 Percent; WNYC’s Bad Feminist Happy Hour and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ The Hitchhiker; Wondery’s Detective Trapp; and MSNBC’s Why Is This Happening?. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with jazz, classical, and pop ensembles such as SFJazz Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc., and the New York Arabic Orchestra. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. Learn more about his work at FernandoArruda.info.

Al Letson is the Peabody Award-winning host of Reveal. Born in New Jersey, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, at age 11 and as a teenager began rapping and producing hip-hop records. By the early 1990s, he had fallen in love with the theater, becoming a local actor and playwright, and soon discovered slam poetry. His day job as a flight attendant allowed him to travel to cities around the country, where he competed in slam poetry contests while sleeping on friends’ couches. In 2000, Letson placed third in the National Poetry Slam and performed on Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam, which led him to write and perform one-man shows and even introduce the 2006 NCAA Final Four on CBS.

In Letson’s travels around the country, he realized that the America he was seeing on the news was far different from the one he was experiencing up close. In 2007, he competed in the Public Radio Talent Quest, where he pitched a show called State of the Re:Union that reflected the conversations he was having throughout the US. The show ran for five seasons and won a Peabody Award in 2014. In 2015, Letson helped create and launch Reveal, the nation’s first weekly investigative radio show, which has won two duPont Awards and three Peabody Awards and been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has also hosted the podcast Errthang; written and developed several TV shows with major networks, including AMC+’s Moonhaven and Apple TV+’s Monarch; and is currently writing a comic for DC Comics. (He loves comics.) When he’s not working, Letson’s often looking for an impossibly difficult meal to prepare or challenging anyone to name a better album than Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides.