Mexican justice has also ordered the arrest of sixty-four soldiers and police after the decision to consider the file as a “state crime”.
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The disappearance of forty-three students in 2014 continues to shake Mexico. Eight years later, the mystery remains whole but the affair is experiencing an unprecedented impact. The former attorney general in charge of the file, Jesus Murillo Karam, was arrested at his home in Mexico City, Friday August 19. The ex-magistrate is accused of “forced disappearance, torture and hindrance to justice”.
This is the first senior official directly implicated in a scandal that had caused a wave of indignation beyond the borders of Mexico. A symbolic arrest which comes just after the publication of a report exhibiting a new official version. Thursday, August 18, the Truth Commission Ayotzinapa, created by President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador to shed light on the drama, made its conclusions: the disappearance of the forty-three students constitutes a “state crime”.
By presenting his report, Alejandro Encinas, vice-minister in charge of human rights, denounces “a concerted action of the power apparatus since the highest bodies of the government” and the “omissions and the participation of the federal, state authorities and municipalities which allowed the disappearance of students then their assassination “.
” Historical truth “quickly disputed
On September 26, 2014 in the evening, a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, in the State of Guerrero, in the southwest of the country, decided to go to a demonstration in Mexico. In accordance with their protest tradition, future teachers requisitioned several buses to go to the capital. But once in the city of Iguala, the procession is caught in ambush. Two students die instantly and forty-three others are missing.
The survey quickly shows inconsistencies. No body was found. Only the calcined bones of three from the group of students could have been identified. At the time, the official version assured that the missing had all been burned on a huge pyre in a public discharge close to Iguala. The local gang, Guerreros Unidos, was then designated as the sole responsible for these disappearances. But this “historical truth”, presented by Jesus Murillo Karam, attorney general of the Republic during the presidency of Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018), had been quickly challenged by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), created at The continuation of an agreement concluded between the Pena Nieto government and the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, to investigate the case.
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