Missing 43 haunt Mexico
In protests over the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, people are shouting their frustration. “We do not believe you!” sceptics proclaim. “The authorities did it!” others shout. A year on from those events of September 26, 2014, with 111 people under arrest and an investigation that has been documented in 115 volumes, the official probe has been highly questioned, and the Mexican government has been severely tarnished.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto took 10 days to order a federal investigation into the so-called Ayotzinapa case, named after the town in the state of Guerrero that is home to the teacher-training college whose students went missing. The case has made large waves in and out of the country. The students are believed to have been handed over by local police to a criminal gang in the town of Iguala, 200 kilometres south of Mexico City, after violence also left six people dead and more than 40 injured and whose motive remains unclear a year on.
“There are people who are directly responsible for the high price that Enrique Pena Nieto has paid and will continue to pay over the Ayotzinapa case, an issue that will haunt him even after his six-year term,” the political analyst Salvador Garcia Soto wrote earlier this week.
A month and a half after the disappearances, then-attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam said, based on the statements of several people arrested in connection with the case, that the youngsters had been killed and burned at a rubbish dump.
And in December Pena Nieto asked the country to turn the page and “really get over this painful moment.” The students’ families were outraged. With no bodies to bury, they rejected the official account.
Violent groups of masked attackers burned and damaged government buildings, particularly in Guerrero, and more broadly blamed the disappearances on the authorities.
Murillo Karam considered the case closed in January, when he said that the “historical truth” of events in Iguala was that the students were dead, even though only one had been proved dead with a DNA test by then. Some 63,000 charred bone fragments have been collected.
Jose Luis Abarca, who was mayor of Iguala at the time for the leftist opposition Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), is among those arrested in the case. Angel Aguirre, also of the PRD, had to resign as governor of Guerrero. However, three weeks ago, the 550-page report of a group of experts designated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) rejected the hypothesis that the students’ bodies had been charred at the rubbish dump. On Saturday, on the one-year anniversary of their disappearance, the students’ families plan to demonstrate again in Mexico City, with their trademark battle cry: “They took them alive, we want them alive!” — dpa