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Six years have passed since the disappearance of Ayotzinapa students without answers

2020-09-26T16:11:43.993Z


On the anniversary of the disappearance of 43 Mexican normalistas, it remains unknown exactly what happened, to the continued regret for families, although important advances are beginning to be made.


MEXICO CITY.- It has been six years of pain, searching and national commotion since a group of rural students was brutally attacked by security forces and criminal groups, who worked together, when the young people were on their way to a protest in Mexico.

On that night in September 2014, six civilians were killed and 43 of the youths, almost all in their first year of college, were last seen aboard police vans.

Since then

his whereabouts have been unknown

.

It remains the event with the most victims of enforced disappearance during a single night in the last decades of the country, where more than 75,000 people are registered as missing.

“We want to leave a better Mexico, a future for new generations, so that [a similar tragedy] does not happen to them.

It's not just 43,

”says Clemente Rodríguez, father of one of the students.

The tireless work of the youth's families and their defenders, as well as the growing protests from fellow students and the demands of the courts are finally being reciprocated by the authorities with

a new investigation.

This is how Mexico comes to another anniversary of the Ayotzinapa case, named after the town in the state of Guerrero where the school to which the young people belonged is located, the Raúl Isidro Burgos School, which trains low-income Mexicans from rural areas or of indigenous descent. to be teachers nicknamed normalistas.

Progress, little by little, against the "historical truth"

The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador scheduled an event this Saturday to report on its

recent actions

 in pursuit of its campaign promise to retake the case, after the previous authorities committed serious irregularities.

[Violence in Mexico leaves thousands of unidentified bodies in morgues]

Empty desks at the Raúl Isidro Burgos School with photographs of the 43 normalista students who were attacked and disappeared on the night of September 26, 2014.

Some of the actions include

search operations while

the youths were

alive

, as well as exhumations and searches of land, one of which resulted in the discovery of remains later identified as one of the students.

Alejandro Encinas, Undersecretary of the Interior, also spoke this Saturday about interrogations to members of the security forces who had not been consulted before about their actions that night and the work to put more people behind bars who were credited had a hand in the attack to the students.

In the previous six-year term, under Enrique Peña Nieto, an attempt was made to close the case with what they

called “historical truth”,

according to which the young normalistas had been cremated by criminal groups in a garbage dump.

Except that, according to international experts, this "truth" was fabricated with the

torture of suspects and mishandling of evidence

;

the tests didn't even support the version of a massive fire where they said it happened.

Faced with the popular clamor, the demands of international academics, courts and associations, the new Government has marked a contrast.

A special commission dedicated to the case was created, and López Obrador has had several meetings with the parents of the missing students.

"We have committed ourselves to clarify all the facts and progress is being made towards that goal," said the president.

In its report known this Saturday, the Government stressed that they have issued 70

warrants to arrest alleged criminals involved and also police and former officials 

accused of participating in the attacks or preventing a fair investigation.

Among these, the former head of investigations Tomás Zerón, who is a fugitive and is believed to have participated in torture.

An international group formed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (known as GIEI) had listed the errors of the previous investigation that have now motivated these actions.

The count of damages

Although for the families of the 43, the advances that there are so far are insufficient if it is not possible to at least know what happened tonight, in which the young people were attacked by security forces and by criminal groups, which apparently coordinated with police and officials.

The GIEI also found since 2017 several

data that were never investigated and that could clarify what happened.

Relatives of the 43 from Ayotzinapa acknowledge progress in the investigation after the meeting with President AMLO

July 10, 202000: 44

[The worst cases of police brutality in Mexico show that abuses are daily]

Six years ago, the later disappeared students seized trucks with the intention of traveling to Mexico City for a protest without having to pay for tickets they could not afford.

Security forces and the Guerreros Unidos drug trafficking group opened fire on the students' trucks and also on another bus with a local soccer team.

But the GIEI discovered that there was another bus,

a fifth truck

, that was not attacked.

The US anti-drug agency, which has studied the Guerreros Unidos cartel, has highlighted in reports that this group used to

move hidden drugs in passenger trucks

.

The possibility remains that police officers in collusion with drug traffickers fired at the students simply because the youths, without realizing it, were on board a bus that had drugs.

The current Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, announced a few days ago that there is "information that sheds light on what really happened" on the night of September 26, 2014, although this alleged information has not been disclosed.

What to expect six years later

In July it was announced that with the new investigation, fragments of bones from a foot had been found in a ravine, ominously nicknamed "The Carnage", and that the skeletal remains coincide with genetic data from Christian Rodríguez Telumbre.

With him would be

three students supposedly confirmed as dead,

from bone fragments, along with Alexander Mora Venancio, who disappeared at 21 years of age and who played soccer in addition to studying;

and Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, who disappeared when he was 20 years old and who wanted to teach so that other children could avoid the fate of his brother, who died trying to emigrate to the United States.

['El Mochomo' falls in Mexico, identified as one of those responsible for the disappearance of the 43 students]

Such findings have been very hard for the relatives: not all have accepted the possibility that some of the normalistas have been murdered.

"We cannot be at peace until all lines of investigation are exhausted," Christian's mother, Luz María Telumbre, told Noticias Telemundo in August.

Although some of the parents, who live in a

limbo of not being able to hug their children but also not being able to watch over them,

seem to be getting used to the idea that perhaps only the latter is possible.

For years, Mexicans chanted "They were taken alive and we want them alive" in massive protests.

Now the main

slogan is #HaciaLaVerdad, 

promoted above all virtually in networks due to the pandemic: if it turns out that students and their families will not be able to be reunited in life, unless it is known what happened, how and why.

Six years later, those answers that point to the truth, painful as it may be, still do not exist.

Clemente Rodríguez and María Telumbre pose with a banner in honor of their son Christian Alfonso, at their home in Tixtla, Guerrero, in 2015Reuters

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2020-09-26

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