Mexico to create vanishings prosecutor
MEXICO CITY — President Enrique Pena Nieto told the families of 43 students who disappeared a year ago in southern Mexico during a meeting Thursday that he would create a new special prosecutor for all of the country’s thousands of missing people.
Eduardo Sanchez, the president’s spokesman, told reporters after the closed meeting that the families had presented eight demands and that Pena Nieto had instructed his Cabinet to analyze each and get back to them.
More than 25,000 people have disappeared in Mexico between 2007 and July 31, according to the government. The students’ disappearance on Sept. 26, 2014, brought the issue back into the spotlight.
Among the families’ demands are a new internationally supervised investigation of the disappearances and an investigation into those responsible for the initial inquiry, which the families believe was intended to mislead them.
After the meeting, Mario Gonzalez, whose son is among the missing students, pointed out that what the government once held up as a “historic truth” about the disappearances, it now calls a hypothesis.
“What guarantee do we have that this new investigation won’t be more theater?” Gonzalez said, surrounded by other parents in Mexico City’s central plaza. “We’re not going to give up; we’re going to continue searching.”
The students disappeared Sept. 26, 2014, in the city of Iguala. They had gone there to commandeer buses that they wanted to use to attend a commemoration in Mexico City. The federal government has said local police from Iguala and the nearby town of Cocula illegally detained the students and turned them over to the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos, which then is believed to have killed them and incinerated their remains. The families have never accepted that version.
The government has said that it has identified two of the students from the burned remains recovered from a river in Cocula.
A team of international experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which spent six months reviewing the government’s investigation, found a number of shortcomings and points of concern. Specifically, it concluded the bodies of 43 students could not have been burned at the garbage dump in Cocula as the government maintained.
Attorney General Arely Gomez earlier said that portion of the government’s investigation would be reviewed with assistance from top international experts. Sanchez confirmed Thursday that international experts would be involved in a third investigation of the alleged incineration site.