First modification:
The Undersecretary of the Interior of Mexico, Alejandro Encinas, who heads the Truth Commission to clarify the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, assured that six of the normalistas were handed over to the commander of the Iguala Battalion, José Rodríguez, who ordered their death. .
It is the first time that the Government of Mexico indicates the active participation of the military in one of the worst scandals of human rights violations in the country.
According to the statements delivered by the Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, six of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, who disappeared in 2014, would have been assassinated following the order of the commander of the Army of Iguala, Colonel José Rodríguez.
“The six students would have been alive up to four days after the events and would have been murdered and disappeared by order of the colonel, supposedly the then colonel José Rodríguez Pérez,” Encinas assured in the presentation of a report on Friday, August 26.
This is who was serving at the time of the attack as commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion, based in the state of Iguala, where the events occurred.
The statements come a week after the Truth Commission concluded that it was “a State crime”, after indicating kidnappings and disappearances that the Army would have observed without intervening.
However, in the last report, Encinas did not identify the alleged direct participation of Rodríguez after the attack, which according to the authorities occurred between the night of September 26 and the early morning of September 27, 2014.
According to the official version, that September 26, the local police took the students off the buses that they had taken in Iguala. The motive for the police action remains unclear nearly nine years later. Their bodies have never been found, although cremated bone fragments of three of the students have been found.
The official’s new statement also raises the probability that the students would have been alive several days after the attack.
Last week, federal agents arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, who oversaw the original investigation. On Wednesday, August 24, a judge ordered that he be prosecuted for enforced disappearance, failure to report torture, and official misconduct.
Prosecutors allege that Karam created a false narrative about what happened to the students for a quick resolution of the case.
Parents say they will continue to search for their children alive
Amid torrential rain later Friday, the families of the 43 missing students marched in Mexico City alongside scores of others, as they have on the 26th of every month for years.
Despite the declarations of the authorities, the parents of the disappeared normalistas assured that they will continue looking for their children alive.
“We will continue with the requirement that the 43 be presented alive. We cannot give up the fight until we have full proof of their whereabouts. It would be painful for our families to know of their fate, especially if it is lifeless, but if they give us proof objective, scientific and indubitable, we will go home crying and live our mourning,” said a joint message read during the demonstration in the Mexican capital.
Parents carrying posters with the faces of their children and rows of current students from the Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa, as well as teachers, marched, shouted calls for justice and counted to 43. Their banners proclaimed that the fight for justice continues and they affirmed: “It was the State”.
Clemente Rodríguez marched for his son Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, a second student identified by a tiny bone fragment.
“It is no longer by default. It is that they participated (…) It was the State, the three levels of Government participated, ”said the man about the military and other authorities linked to the events.
The relatives of the students insisted that the report of the Truth Commission opens avenues of investigation, search and criminal action “that the competent authorities must follow and exhaust.”
With Reuters, AP and EFE
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