Missing students loom for Mexico’s next leader
AYOTZINAPA, MEXICO — Four years after the disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico, the case remains unsolved, international human rights groups said Monday, as they called on the next president to conduct a proper investigation.
The case of the missing students prompted global outrage and shook Mexico to its core, plunging President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval ratings to new lows. At a ceremony Monday at their school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, representatives from several rights groups said their disappearance had still not been explained.
The official account, disputed by international experts, is that the students were kidnapped by local police officers who turned them over to a drug gang. The gang killed them and burned their bodies in a nearby garbage dump, leaving no remains.
“The commission does not accept that narrative,” said Esmeralda Arosemena de Troitiño, rapporteur for Mexico at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. “No more talk about what they describe as ‘historic truth,’ because it hurts us, it outrages us and the families of the victims simply do not tolerate it.”
Arosemena said the commission hoped that President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1, would take advantage of the change in government to open an independent investigation. He defeated the candidate from Peña Nieto’s party in the July election.
López Obrador has repeatedly said that he is committed to further investigating the case with the help of international human rights organizations and making sure that “justice is done.”
“The doors of the country will be opened,” he said last month. “There will be no obstruction or obstacles that will keep us from discovering the truth in the Ayotzinapa case.”
The rights groups said a new investigation should examine the role of the federal police and the military in the students’ disappearance, possible obstruction of the investigation by government officials, and accusations that at least 34 of the 129 people arrested in connection with the case had been tortured.
Representatives from the commission, the United Nations and Mexico’s top human rights agency appeared Monday at Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, where the missing students, many of them sons of farmers, were training to become rural teachers in hope of escaping lives of poverty. The male-only school has a history of leftist activism, with students using radical tactics like blocking roads and throwing rocks at police officers.
At the school’s basketball court, 43 empty chairs were lined up behind the podium to represent the missing young men. A crowd of current students invoked the date the students disappeared, chanting: “September the 26th will not be forgotten. Alive they took them, alive we want them back!”
On that night in 2014, about 100 students left the school to hijack several buses for transportation to a march in Mexico City, a long-standing tradition that was mostly tolerated by bus companies and law enforcement officials.
But this time, police officers and other gunmen pursued the stolen buses and opened fire on the students in a coordinated assault in and around the city of Iguala. Six people were killed and dozens wounded. The 43 missing students, who had been pulled off two of the buses, were last seen being taken away by the police. The remains of only one have been identified.
The case became emblematic of the tens of thousands of disappearances during Mexico’s decadelong drug war, bringing protesters into the streets by the thousands and throwing Peña Nieto’s presidency into crisis.
Recently, before his final state of the union address, Peña Nieto said in a video released on Twitter that his administration stood by the official findings. He said it was understandable the victims’ parents could not accept the painful truth — a remark that caused indignation among the victims’ families and human rights groups.
International investigators arrived in 2015 at the invitation of the Mexican government. But after they contradicted the official version of events, they said, the government began a campaign of harassment and stonewalling that made it impossible for them to do their work. The investigators left the following year.
In June, a federal court ordered the Mexican government to investigate the case again, calling the first inquiry “neither prompt, effective, independent nor impartial.” The court ordered that the new investigation be supervised by a truth commission to be led by Mexico’s human rights body and victims’ families, who have already waited years for answers.
“Anger is all I can feel,” said Delfina de la Cruz, mother of Adán Abraham de la Cruz, who was 24 when he went missing.