Julio Cesar Mondragon was, by all accounts, a young man of character, dedicated to becoming a teacher in one of the poorest regions of Mexico through his studies at The Raul Isidro Burgos Normal Rural School in Ayotzinapa, a small town in the state of Guerrero. When his body was found after the grisly events of Sept. 26, the skin had been peeled off his face and his eyes had been gouged out.

This is the story of three dead students, as well as three bystanders, along with many injured and another 43, all in their late teens, who were taken by police outside the Mexican city of Iguala, and who are still missing and presumed dead. It is a story that has been mostly relegated to the back pages of major U.S. newspapers, if it was reported at all. Who were these students, and what were the circumstances surrounding their disappearance and those allegedly responsible for the events that have convulsed a nation?

The Normalistas

The Raul Isidro Burgos Normal Rural School has a long and storied history beginning in 1926, shortly after the Mexican Revolution. It was one of 45 rural teacher training colleges established to give poor students a chance to bring the precious commodity of education back to their communities. Of the original 45 schools, only 16 remain, partly the result of the drive to privatize Mexico’s education system in recent years.

But the schools have always done more than just train teachers. The Normalistas, as they are called, were also taught “to tend to the sick, oversee the building of water systems, and serve as intermediaries to obtain rural bank loans for cooperatives." They were often the only people with post-secondary education in their villages and, in their advocacy for Mexico’s poor, they have locked horns with government authorities since the beginning.

The Ayotzinapa School is no exception. It even produced at least one would-be revolutionary in the 1960s, Lucio Cabanas, leader of the Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor). Cabanas is immortalized in murals at the school, alongside older Mexican heroes like Emiliano Zapata and foreign revolutionaries like Che Guevara.

The Normalistas don’t just march and protest, they engage in direct action. Students have taken over toll roads and allowed commuters to travel over them for free. They’ve also blocked other roads and highways to raise awareness of long-running government actions to cut their funding. It was during one such road blockade in 2011 that two students were killed by police, an incident that still hasn’t resulted in any prosecutions.

Among the poor in the state of Guerrero, the students of the Ayotzinapa school are greatly respected for the work they do in the community. To give one recent example, “they were the first to respond last year after the hurricanes Manuel and Ingrid, when the city of Tixtla was flooded and thousands were left homeless. Government assistance did not arrive for days, students say, because it was focused on Guerrero’s resort town of Acapulco.”

The picture that emerges from the terrible day in September is still somewhat out of focus, with conflicting reports from student advocates and official sources. What we do know is that over a hundred students were on their way to the the nearby city of Iguala to protest education “reforms” that threatened to raise their tuition, making it impossible for many of them to continue their studies.

As they were making their way to the city, authorities say they “commandeered” three buses, although representatives of the students say they had prior permission to use the vehicles. They were stopped by police, resulting in a violent standoff. In the ensuing chaos, the missing 43 were taken from the scene by police. What happened next defies all reason, as do so many stories from Mexico these days.

The Guerreros Unidos and The Imperial Couple

By all accounts, the students were handed over to the Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors) gang, a splinter of two criminal networks that include the Beltran Leyva Cartel and La Familia, a now defunct group based in the nearby state of Michoacan. The latter was one of the stranger Cartels, espousing the “muscular” Christian ideology of its leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez. Think Tony Montana meets Anthony Robbins, by way of the Bible.

That police handed the students over to the GU wouldn’t have surprised even the most casual of observers, considering that police corruption in the region is so endemic that it has given rise to a vigilante movement, which has had some surprising success in reining in the lawlessness of these gangs. What is shocking is who is alleged to have ordered the confrontation and the abductions.

Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa and her husband, the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, were fingered by the police and Guerreros members who were taken into custody in the weeks after the incident. According to a story in The New York Times, Pineda Villa, who was running to take the place of her husband as mayor (and who also happens to be the sister of two deceased GU members), told the gangsters that the students were members of Los Rojos (The Reds), a rival gang. The same story also notes that the mayor himself ordered police to stop the buses as they approached the city.

The Imperial Couple, as locals had taken to calling the mayor and his wife, fled the town shortly after, and were on the run until they were arrested in Mexico City on Nov. 4. Cartel connections and delusions of grandeur may have finally undone one powerful couple, and may even bring a measure of justice for the students. But this is no cause for celebration. Consider for a moment how many towns and cities in Mexico are run by people a lot like them.

The Fallout

As investigators searched for the students, they found multiple mass graves in the area, some of which likely contained the remains of the more than 25,000 people reported missing in the country since former President Ernesto Zedillo ratcheted up the Drug War in 2006. This was done with the full-throated support of American policy makers, most of whom remained remarkably quiet in the ensuing chaos.

The western media, always focused on the “crisis du jour,” has also ignored this slow moving tragedy except as it concerns the militarization of America’s southern border. In fact, it was one Cartel, the Zetas, that popularized the Youtube beheading as a terror tactic long before there was such a thing as ISIS in the Middle East.

This might be because Mexico, for all its problems, is headed in “the right direction,” at least in the eyes of business interests and the global elite. The country has accelerated the privatization of everything from the country’s oil – long protected through nationalization – to education. Along these lines, an active “war” plays into authorities’ hands, giving them an excuse to go after peasant organizations, labor organizers and revolutionary groups like the Zapatistas. It's an official tactic with a long history in Latin America.

The current president of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, has proven himself particularly out of touch, ignoring the story until the public outcry demanded a response. Could you imagine any president from an ostensibly democratic country waiting more than a month to meet with the parents of 43 missing teenagers? Many commentators, especially local ones, have claimed this is because Mexican politicians assume that if they wait long enough, any crime will be forgotten. To be fair, history shows this is often the case. With the international media ignoring the story, who would stand up to advocate for an end to the culture of impunity?

It turned out that it was the Mexican people themselves, especially students from all walks of life, who rose up to demand justice for the missing 43: by leaving their schools and taking to the streets in protests that have intensified in recent days. Their battle cry has risen across the country, especially after an exasperated comment made at a press conference by the attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, where he described in horrific detail the chemical bonfire which he believes was the student’s ultimate fate.

“Ya me canse” (“I am tired”), Murillo Karam then said, as he abruptly ended the press conference. In response, the people of Mexico have shown in the past week that they too are tired. They are tired of a tiny elite that treats them like subjects rather than citizens, they are tired of the criminal gangs that terrorize them and corrupt the political process, and most of all, they are tired of hearing about the disappeared and all the families that will never be the same.