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Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested one day after the Truth Commission, created to investigate the disappearance of the 43 young people in 2014, concluded that the act constituted “a State crime.” The former attorney general of Mexico is accused of forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice.
This is the highest official to be arrested for the Ayotzinapa case. Jesús Murillo Karam, who was the head of the former Attorney General’s Office during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto and the person in charge of the investigations into the disappearance of the 43 normalistas, was arrested on Friday, August 19.
Murillo Karam is credited with the “historical truth” presented in 2015 according to which the students had been kidnapped by alleged members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, who murdered and incinerated them and later threw the remains in the Cocula dump, in the south of Chilpancingo, the capital of the state of Guerrero.
The relatives of the young people never accepted that version, since it included accusations that the students belonged to a rival criminal group. Additionally, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found contradictions and inconsistencies in it.
In 2021, the IACHR published its final report in which it indicates the participation of state authorities – namely, politicians, police and members of the Army – in the disappearance of the 43.
Precisely, on Thursday, August 18, the Commission for the Truth and Access to Justice of the Ayotzinapa Case, created during the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, concluded that the act was a “state crime” and that the municipal, state and federal “allowed the disappearance of the 43 people with their actions, omissions and even participating in the events.”
On Friday, the Mexican Prosecutor’s Office also issued more than 80 arrest warrants against soldiers, police, state officials and members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel for crimes related to the case.
The chronology of a case that shook all of Mexico
On September 24, 2014, a group of students did the same thing that many normalistas do every year: take buses from the Iguala transportation center to travel to Mexico City and participate in the acts in memory of the 1968 student massacre. A common practice that ended with an attack in which three students died and three other people – who were not students – also lost their lives.
A total of 57 people disappeared.
On October 4, 2014, days after the disappearance, the discovery of bodies in graves unleashes tension. The Guerrero State Prosecutor’s Office affirms that the municipal police arrested the young people and handed them over to a drug-trafficking group, Guerreros Unidos.
In protest and to demand more information, other normalistas from Ayotzinapa and the neighboring state of Michoacán set fire to the house of the governor of Guerrero.
The government of Enrique Peña Nieto sends in the Army while the word spreads throughout the country and in October 2014 Mexican students demonstrate in several cities to ask for justice.
A tide of people takes over the most famous resort in Guerrero, Acapulco, and the protests reach Mexico City while the Mexican president assured that the protests sought to “destabilize” the country.
Almost a month after the disappearance, the governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre, resigned due to social pressure.
And in January 2015, the then attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, presented the supposed historical truth.
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