On the night of September 26, 2014, 43 students from the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa were attacked by local police in the city of Iguala in southern Mexico. The police were found to be in collusion with criminal organisations and the testimonies provided were contradictory. In November of the same year, several plastic bags containing human remains, possibly those of the missing students, were found dumped by a river. Much of what happened that night remains a mystery.
Three years on, London-based investigative agency Forensic Architecture has launched a sophisticated web tool that visualises the attacks to try and unpick the mystery. The tool combines cartography and 3D modelling to give a visual representation of the events that led up to the attacks and the events shortly after. It’s aim? To examine the many conflicting narratives of the night and try and reveal exactly what happened.
The fate of the 43 remains unclear. An official investigation found that while in custody the students were likely handed over to a local crime syndicate and presumably killed. More than 80 suspects have been arrested to date, including 44 police officers. Only two students have been confirmed as dead after their remains were identified.
Working in collaboration with the Mexican human-rights organisation Centro Prodh, and Argentinian Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF), Forensic Architecture’s tool lets anyone follow individual actors or vehicles throughout the time-frame to closely examine what happened. Forensic Architecture hopes it will be a useful tool for parents, private investigators and the general public to further interrogate all the available evidence.
“Each crime scene can be rotated and seen from different perspectives. Users can zoom into details or experience the attack from an eye-level perspective,” says Nadia Méndez, a researcher on the team. The 3D crime scenes use an experimental technology that extends the current WebGL libraries, with all the data based on photographs of crime scenes that were fed into a computer and turned into a 3D point cloud.
Work on the platform began in 2016 and follows projects investigating conflicts in Gaza to Guatemala, both of which used videos and photographs to visualise and record events. “This has been a very different project in the sense that it is much less spatial and less anchored in visual material” says project coordinator Stefan Laxness. “In previous projects we have used a specific photograph to build on a lot of stuff, but here the photographic material was too dark and grainy.”
The project relied on information compiled by the two reports of the International Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) and oral accounts recorded a month after the attack by investigative journalist John Gibler. “What is important is that we have not necessarily found new information. We have visualised the reports, which were actually incredibly inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have six months to read through it, break it down and understand it,” Laxness says.
“What you start to see immediately is that attacks happen at different parts of town at the same time and the act of forced disappearing actually happens at two different parts of town with a half an hour window, so almost identical, and the thing is being able to see that movement and see the data points on a map. The platform makes clear that all government forces are communicating by central communication system, everybody is either there perpetuating violence or an observer of violence.”
The 3D models of the crime scene also point to flaws in the testimonies of the interviewed police agents. One of the attacks on the students took place in front of the local court, which was captured by an exterior security cameras. However. The Guerrero judiciary decided to destroy the videos, citing technical issues and explaining that the images were of no interest. “Challenging that decision, we made a video where we locate the cone of vision and suggest which incidents could have been captured by the cameras,” Méndez explains.
Of particular interest to the team is the multi-layered ontology describing the violence that unfolded, allowing users to search the platform for significant word patterns such as “contradictions” and “torture”. “Where these incidences have been flagged by the GIEI report, you can search every incidence of contradiction or suspected torture. You can see patterns that aren’t just actors,” Laxness says.
The project hopes to provide transparency to a case full of diluted and confused narratives. “Reading articles from Mexican news outlets, the condensed information means they do not represent the full scale of what actually happened,” Laxness continues. “The hope is that it will give a broader section of society the capability to freely explore a very complicated story that has been enlarged with a false narrative.”
Read more: Forensic Architecture is unravelling conflict from Gaza to Guatemala
The project is part of Forensic Architecture’s wider objective to turn the forensic gaze back on the state and hold governments to account. All the material released on to the Ayotzinapa Platform will also be available to the public at an exhibition at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), as part of a broader exhibition on other investigations conducted by Forensic Architecture.
“In the future, we would like to put this structure into a package as an open source to allow other people to do their investigations,” Laxness says. “In the mean time, this platform allows a wider section of Mexican society to have access to the reports and hopefully start discussion about the full extent of collusion between state agencies."
All the material collated by Forensic Architecture will be available to the public at an exhibition at Museo Univer-sitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City from September 9 until early January 2018. Guides will be available to help explain how the digital forensics tool works.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
