Mexico president-elect vows probe on 43 missing students
MEXICO CITY: Mexican President- elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Wednesday promised the parents of 43 students abducted in 2014 to unravel the unsolved case, on the anniversary of a suspected massacre that traumatized the country.
Four years on, Mexico is still haunted by the disappearance of the students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the southern state of Guerrero.
The case has become a symbol of the gruesome violence rocking the country, and a stain on the human rights record of the man Lopez Obrador will replace on Dec 1, outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto.
Speaking after meeting with the students’ parents, the leftist president- elect vowed he would work to shed light on the crime from the day he takes office.
“On Dec 1, if it has not already been done, we will sign a decree to create an investigative commission and define the procedures we will follow until the truth is found and justice is done,” said Lopez Obrador.
“We also agreed to throw open the doors of the next government and the country to the international human rights organizations that have battled to prevent this case from being closed,” he told journalists.
The 43 young men attended a school known for its tradition of rowdy demonstrations for left-wing causes, the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College.
On the night of Sept 26, 2014, they commandeered five buses to travel to a protest — a long- standing tradition at the college — and were attacked and then detained by municipal police in the city of Iguala, Guerrero.
According to federal prosecutors, corrupt police officers who were on the payroll of the drug cartel Guerreros Unidos mistook the students for members of a rival cartel.
They allegedly handed them over to Guerreros Unidos hitmen, who slaughtered them and incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump.
However, independent investigators from the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights who carried out a forensic analysis of the supposed crime scene found that version of events was impossible.
There was no sign that such an enormous bonfire had burned at the site, they said.
The government’s failure to clarify the case has caused widespread speculation about an elaborate cover-up.
The independent experts hypothesized the students may have inadvertently hijacked a bus loaded with heroin bound for the United States.
In a country known for murky links between powerful drug cartels and corrupt officials, that has raised questions about who could have been behind such a shipment. The case has drawn international condemnation of Pena Nieto’s government, which continues to insist the prosecution’s version of events is the ‘historical truth.’
The meeting with Lopez Obrador gave the outraged, grieving parents ‘a ray of hope,’ said Maria Elena Guerrero, the mother of student Giovanni Galindes, who was 20 when he disappeared. — AFP