Mexico's former attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, will be tried in criminal court for the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, an emblematic case that had gone far beyond the country's borders, a Mexican judge decided on Wednesday August 24.
Attached to the presidential cabinet at the time, Jesús Murillo Karam will be prosecuted for
"enforced disappearances, torture and obstruction of justice"
, the Federal Council of the Judiciary (CJF) told the press.
During an appearance, Jesús Murillo Karam defended the controversial investigation into the disappearance of 43 students from the Normal School of Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, on the night of September 26-27.
In preventive detention since Friday, he also defended the
"historical truth"
in the Ayotzinapa case, the tip of the iceberg of the 100,000 missing in Mexico.
This historical
“truth”
does not mention the involvement of security forces.
Published last week, a report by a government commission denounces on the contrary
“a state crime
”
with
the participation of the military.
Read alsoMexico: more than 100,000 people missing since 1964
Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested on Friday, the day after the publication of this report.
He had served under President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
He is a former heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who governed Mexico for 71 years without interruption until 2000 and then from 2012 to 2018. He is the most important personality arrested until now as part of these investigations, which had restarted from scratch after the coming to power in 2019 of leftist President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.
(AMLO) The prosecution has also issued arrest warrants against 64 police and military personnel, as well as 14 members of the drug trafficking cartel Guerreros Unidos.
Students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school had traveled to the nearby town of Iguala to
"requisition"
buses to travel to Mexico City for a protest.
According to the official investigation in force so far, the 43 young people were arrested by the local police in collusion with the Guerreros Unidos gang and then shot and burned in a landfill for reasons that remain unclear.
Only the remains of three of them could be identified.
On Thursday, the official report published by the "Ayotzinapa Truth Commission" set up by AMLO estimated that the Mexican military had some responsibility for this crime, one of the worst cases of human rights violations in Mexico, where there are some 100,000 missing.
