Mexico: discovery of the remains of a second student, missing with 43 others in 2014

The remains of one of the 43 Mexican students who have disappeared since September 2014 in the state of Guerrero (southern Mexico) have been identified, announced on Tuesday the prosecutor in charge of this file, Omar Gómez "This corresponds to the student Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, presumably of a lower limb , " said the prosecutor with reference to one of the six pieces of bone found in the ravine of La Carniceria, in the municipality of Cocula.

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These remains had been sent this year by the prosecution to the Institute of Genetics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, for the so-called Ayotzinapa case, a Mexican agricultural school. He is the second student identified, after Alexander Mora Venancio, also by the Austrian institute, at the end of 2014.

The file “still in progress”

The ravine of La Carnicería is 800 meters from the Colula river where the remains of the 43 students were thrown after being burned, according to the investigation of the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, which precedes that of the current president. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. "The case is still under way," said Omar Gómez, who said that relatives of Christian Alfonso Rodriguez Telumbre, 19 when he disappeared, had already been privately informed a few days ago.

The ravine is 800 meters from the Cocula landfill, where the remains of the 43 students are said to have been thrown out after being burned, according to the official administration version of former President Enrique Peña Nieto. But this investigation, marred by suspicions of corruption, has been widely criticized. Coming to power in late 2018, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has promised to shed light on this crime.

These students had disappeared during the night of September 26 to 27, 2014. That night, dozens of students from Ayotzinapa rural normal school had gone to Iguala to take the buses they wanted to use for demonstrations, and had been attacked by municipal police on the orders of the mayor. According to the official version, these corrupt police officers then delivered them to the Guerreros Unidos cartel, which would have confused them with a rival cartel and killed them, before cremating their bodies in a landfill.

But independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) questioned this version in a report published in 2015. In 2018, a Mexican court ordered to resume the investigation and demanded the creation of a "commission of the truth ”after the complaints of persons indicted in this case.

Unanswered questions

The hardest thing to digest for the relatives of the disappeared was undoubtedly the acquittal at the end of August 2018 of Gildardo López Astudillo, yet presented as the "material author" of the disappearance.

Read also: Mexico: suspect arrested in the disappearance of 43 students

To calm the anger of the families, to whom President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, nicknamed "AMLO", had personally promised justice and truth in 2017, the government had launched legal proceedings against the former Minister of Justice, Jesus Murillo Karam, as well as Thomas Zeron, then director of criminal investigations. But, above all, justice must always answer the many questions left unanswered by the experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, whose mission had been shortened. What role did the army and the federal police, who had been monitoring the students for several hours, play? Did the students accidentally hijack a bus loaded with heroin bound for the United States? And finally what happened to the bodies if they could not be cremated in the landfill?