Between September 26 and 27, 2014, acts of extreme violence occurred in the town of Iguala, in Guerrero. There, 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School, located where the Ayotzinapa hacienda was, disappeared, and several more people lost their lives or suffered severe damage. That is the scene, that was the crime. The confusing events of that very long night, in which municipal police and members of a criminal group participated, were followed by an unprecedented investigation by the federal authorities, and yet, soon the public opinion forged the certainty that something would unite that tragedy with that of October 2, 1968 in Tlatelolco. In this short volume, Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo and Julián Canseco Ibarra are interested not in the events themselves, but in the symbolic construction that took place in the press, expert reports, street expressions, as well as in the effects that “culture antagonistic ”—a frame of reference based on suspicion of any action by the State— in understanding the social and historical reality of our country. Supported by a model proposed by Marshall Sahlins, the authors find the mechanisms of interpretation that allowed to place both events, grossly distorted, in the same chain of outrages.

"What interests us in this book is exploring the cultural order that made it possible (and in the end, almost obvious) for the Iguala event to see a repetition of the massacre in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas."
Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo and Julián Canseco Ibarra

"After reading this essay, one can only feel annoyance and concern about the gap between the radical changes in Mexico in recent decades and how poor and anachronistic our intellectual instruments and our ways of thinking about reality are."
Marco Estrada, The College of Mexico