As Mexico searches for missing 43, 6 killings lost from view
SAN MIGUEL TECOMATLAN, Mexico — Unlike the families of the 43 students who disappeared a year ago, Julio Cesar Mondragon’s loved ones were left with a body to bury. But there is little comfort in that, because Mondragon’s corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments.
His autopsy showed several skull fractures, internal bleeding and other injuries consistent with torture. His face had been flayed, a tactic often used by the drug cartels to incite terror. Photos of his bloody skull were uploaded to the Internet.
International attention has been focused on the 43 students who vanished a year ago Saturday, but six others died at the hands of police in those hours, including Mondragon, a 22-year-old father of a girl who is now 1 year old. According to an independent group of experts, the disappearances and the killings were the result of a long, coordinated attack against students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa who had come to the southern city of Iguala to commandeer buses for a protest.
But the events of last Sept. 26 were far from isolated. Some 25,000 people have been reported missing in Mexico since 2007, hundreds from the Iguala area in the last year alone. The disappearance of the students has drawn attention to others who have been lost, as well as to brutal drug cartels, official corruption, government indifference and languishing legal cases.
According to Mexico’s former attorney general, the 43 disappeared in an attack by police and the Guerreros Unidos drug gang because they were mistaken for rival gang members. The attorney general said last November they were killed and burned to ash in a giant pyre in the nearby Cocula garbage dump.
The independent experts, assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, took apart that story earlier this month, saying authorities knew who the students were from the minute they headed for Iguala, and at the very least did nothing to stop the attacks.
They say the pyre simply didn’t happen and suggest the attack occurred because students unknowingly hijacked a bus carrying illegal drugs or money. Iguala is known as a transit hub for heroin going to the United States.
Families say the judicial neglect extends to Mondragon and five others killed that night. Fellow students Daniel Solis and Julio Cesar Ramirez were shot dead at close range. Driver Victor Manuel Lugo Ortiz and David Jose Garcia Evangelista, 15, died when police fired at a soccer team bus. Blanca Montiel, 40, was killed by stray gunfire while riding in a taxi.
Mondragon had been on one of the buses when it was attacked, then later showed up at a news conference the students called at 12:30 a.m. He fled when police opened fire. Witnesses said shortly after they last saw him, they heard screams from someone they assumed had been detained. About 6 a.m., soldiers found his body less than a mile from where he disappeared.
Though Mondragon’s autopsy points to torture, that doesn’t appear in the court records. A report by a military unit at the scene said his face had been peeled off with a knife. But the autopsy said it could have been done by an animal after the body was dumped. His family called that conclusion “a mockery.”
Mondragon’s case could provide clues to who was behind the attack, according to the commission. But it languishes in three separate court files. Mondragon’s body will be exhumed for a new autopsy.
The former mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, is among 28 people charged with his killing. Authorities say he was the one who ordered the attacks. But Sayuri Herrera, attorney for the Mondragon family, said it would be easy for any defense attorney to get the charges thrown out because the shabby investigative work and foggy charges filed by prosecutors could weaken the case. Charges have already been dropped against one police officer who remains jailed for the missing 43.
“There’s not even clarity in the accusations,” Herrera said.
Mondragon’s family gathers most Saturdays at the large table in his uncle Cuitlahuac’s modest concrete home, sometimes to meet with Herrera, sometimes for psychological counseling, always to plot a path to justice.
“Here we all pretend to be strong,” said Lenin Mondragon, 22.
They want the case taken up by federal prosecutors. The Inter-American Commission’s experts also say the six murders should be part of the federal case of the 43 because they complete the picture of what happened that night. The attorney general’s office has refused. The office did not respond to requests for comment.
The case remains with state prosecutors in Guerrero, where a lack of resources and expertise make it even less likely that justice will be served.