Panel criticizes Mexico for dropping arrest warrants in missing students case
An independent panel has criticized Mexico for withdrawing arrest warrants, mostly for military members, in the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students, saying there was sufficient evidence to press charges.
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) said it did not know why 21 of 83 arrest orders were dropped just as investigators were moving forward with detentions, including that of Mexico’s former top prosecutor, in one of the country’s most notorious human rights scandals.
“To us, it is incomprehensible why these arrest warrants were withdrawn,” GIEI member Claudia Paz y Paz told a news conference, while fellow panelist Francisco Cox called some aspects of the government’s investigation “clumsy” and “rushed”.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018 vowing to uncover the truth around the suspected abduction and massacre of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, after his predecessor’s inquiry was riddled with errors and abuses.
In addition to renewing the mandate of the GIEI, which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights formed in 2014, López Obrador also named a special prosecutor and created a truth commission.
The special prosecutor who has led the government’s investigation since 2019 resigned in September over apparent interference by the attorney general, and the government replaced him with someone unfamiliar with the case.
A government truth commission report in August dubbed the disappearances a “state crime” but muddied the waters by presenting questionable screen captures of message exchanges as evidence, according to the GIEI.
The GIEI later analyzed the messages and found inconsistencies that it said ruled out the possibility of using them as legal evidence.
It also said the messages were not part of the documentation used to request the 83 orders to arrest military, police, local officials and others, noting prosecutors did not base their investigation on the truth commission’s report.
Mexico’s top human rights official, Alejandro Encinas, who leads the commission, told reporters last week that the WhatsApp messages comprised just one part of a larger analysis.
Panelist Carlos Beristain noted that confusion around the case had grown due to “an effort to rush the results”. Yet he also said the GIEI stood by the evidence obtained for the arrests.
“In spite of what’s been said in recent weeks, the investigation is sufficiently strong,” he said.
Beristain added that the GIEI asked to extend its mandate for another two months from Monday, requesting that two of its four members continue their work to ensure the case proceeds smoothly.
The experts insisted that there was still evidence that members of the military were following the events of that night closely yet did not intervene to save the students – or even one of their own, who had infiltrated the school noted for leftwing activism.
Phone intercepts that are part of a drug trafficking case in Chicago have also established close contact between members of the military and the gang that allegedly was given the students after they were seized by police, Guerreros Unidos.
The experts said they had asked President López Obrador again to instruct the military to share all of its related archives on the case, including phone intercepts they say it has from the time of the abductions.
On 26 September 2014, local police took the students off buses they had commandeered in Iguala, Guerrero. The motive for the police action remains unclear eight years later, but investigators believe drug trafficking was at least partly involved.
The students’ bodies have never been found, though fragments of burned bone have been matched to three of the students.
On Sunday, the government announced the arrest of Leonardo Octavio Vázquez Pérez, who was the Guerrero state security chief at the time of the students’ abduction. A former police officer from Huitzuco, a town near Iguala, was arrested last week for his alleged involvement.