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Five keys to the Ayotzinapa case after five years of the disappearance of the 43 students

2019-09-26T19:46:37.527Z


Five years have passed since 43 students of the normal Ayotzinapa disappeared and their relatives are still looking for answers about their whereabouts. This has happened in five years of research ...


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(CNN Spanish) - Five years have passed since 43 students of the normal Ayotzinapa disappeared after an armed attack that, according to the first versions, were arrested by corrupt police officers and killed by drug traffickers from the local Guerreros Unido cartel, an official version that later It was discredited.

Five years later, the next of kin of the victims still do not receive answers as to what happened on September 26, 2014, and they continue to be found alive or scientifically proven to have been killed.

This is a recount of what has happened since then:

  • The missing in Mexico: who responds for a lost generation?

What happened?

43 students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Normal School in Ayotzinapa, in Iguala, Guerrero, disappeared between September 26 and 27, 2014 when they went to a demonstration and were attacked by corrupt police officers - associated with a group of drug traffickers -, then executed, their bodies incinerated in a dump and the remains thrown into a river. This was the initial version of the Mexican authorities about the facts.

That version, called "historical truth" by the Attorney General's Office, reported that the young people were forcibly taking four buses for their political mobilizations and, when they were attacked by corrupt police, they captured them and handed them over to drug dealers in the cartel. local United Warriors, who killed them for suspecting that they were members of a rival cartel.

But this version of the government was discredited a year later, in 2015, by an independent group of forensic experts hired by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) who determined that the students could not have been incinerated at the Cocula dump. The experts of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) said at the time that there was no evidence that there had been any fire in that dump.

What happened to the investigations?

Five years later there has not been a single conviction on this case.

Five years later, the Mexican Human Rights Secretariat said that between September 2014 and August 2018, 142 people were allegedly arrested, “particularly civilians linked to the United Warriors cartel, as well as municipal police officers from Iguala and Cocula,” all of them linked to the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43.

However, the Undersecretary of Human Rights, Population and Migration of Mexico, Alejandro Encinas, denounced at the beginning of September 2019 that due process has been committed, due to which 77 of the suspects have been released. The reason? Of the 107 evidence collected by the prosecution, more than half have been discarded in court; Only 44 tests are being admitted. The AMLO government admitted that there are failures in the process and that the supposed historical truth of the previous government does not exist.

The secretary of DD.HH issued a report this month giving details of the investigations that have been carried out by said entity.

During the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), an investigation office of the Iguala case was created, which, like the so-called “historical version”, was disqualified by a group of international experts and experts, according to the most recent report of the DD Secretariat. HH .. That entity denounced “irregularities and illegalities and abuses that had occurred in the investigations and processes on this matter”, so it created the Commission for La Verdad, which is made up of the undersecretary of the Interior and where family members of the victims

The Attorney General of Mexico, Alejandro Gertz Manero, told relatives this month that investigations should begin from scratch.

Before the eventuality of being investigated for this case, the exprocurator Jesús Murillo Karam has said in several media that he is calm, because he says that the work that was done during his administration as head of the PGR was solid and was based on 300 tests blunt

What does the AMLO government say?

The secretary of DD. H H. He said this month that the Government of AMLO will initiate an investigation to officials of the Prosecutor's Office to establish responsibilities in cases where the due process has been violated and where it is found that there was a bad application of the law.

At a meeting held by the Mexican president with relatives of the disappeared on September 11, AMLO promised them that this time there will be results. The president said his government is facilitating the participation of international organizations and specialized human rights groups to continue the investigations

“We need the results, that we know where the young people are. That is their demand and that is what we want too. And we are doing everything we can, everything is due, ”said AMLO in his morning press conference with the press on September 12.

At the meeting, López Obrador called on those who had information on the case to approach the authorities, including those who participated in the events.

“If there are people who intervened, they have the protection of the government,” said AMLO. "It is a service that is provided to the country if you know what is known."

What do parents say?

Although with the new government the parents have made progress in terms of changes in investigations - for example with the creation of the new commission of inquiry - for those who have lost their children they still do not have total confidence.

“We do not trust López Obrador, but he speaks to us very beautifully, that he will tell us, that he will find the whereabouts of our children, but we will trust until he has more proof that he already tells us that if our children live , if our children do not live, ”said Metodia Castillo, mother of one of the missing students.

“This thing is going very slowly and I as a father do not have confidence yet, not because he is already with us and has signed the decree, we are going to say, you are going to do something fast, or you can lie to us, we cannot know, I cannot I have confidence, but I hope in God, hopefully and God willing, ”said Bernardo Campos, father of another of the disappeared.

The missing in Mexico

The 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa, are just the tip of the Iceberg of one of the most heartbreaking realities that Mexico has behind them: the disappeared.

According to the National Registry of Missing or Missing Persons Data (RNPED), in Mexico as of January 2019, more than 40,000 people had been registered as missing throughout the country, and 36,000 unidentified dead. The National Search Commissioner, Roberto Cabrera, reported that his agency consolidated a base with genetic information from more than 50,000 profiles of relatives of missing persons.

The figure is higher than that recorded two years ago in the National Registry of Missing or Missing Persons (RNPED), which accounted for 27,000 cases of disappearances throughout Mexico.

A report by the Mexican Senate in April 2018 showed a progressive increase in the number of missing persons in the last decade, from 646 cases of missing persons in 2007, to 5,477 missing persons in 2017.

According to that report, which gathered information from the RNPED, until April 2018 there were a total of 37,435 missing, most of them men between the ages of 20 and 25. The entities where more cases were registered were Tamaulipas (6,131), the State of Mexico (3,918), Jalisco (3,388), Sinaloa (3,042) and Nuevo Léon (2,918).

- With information from Krupskaia Alís from Mexico and Kay Guerrero from Atlanta.

Ayotzinapa Case Disappeared in Mexico

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2019-09-26

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