Eight years have passed since the Ayotzinapa massacre under the shadow of impunity

What was originally attributed exclusively to powerful drug cartels, the disappearance of 43 students who were on their way to a protest in Mexico City, has been designated as a State crime by the Truth Commission set up to clarify the case.

The young students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School were part of a hundred students who had hijacked buses, a common practice of protest in the midst of a struggle to keep this type of educational institution alive, whose existence was threatened.

Their objective was to reach the capital to participate on October 2 in a demonstration to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre, a violent attack by Army forces that left hundreds dead, perpetrated in 1968 to contain a student protest and prevent a series of of marches will affect the organization of the Olympic Games.

Hours of anguish and years of impunity

A first group of students from the caravan found a political act to celebrate the management of the local chapter of the National System for the Integral Development of the Family, whose direction was in the hands of María de los Ángeles Pineda, wife of the mayor of Iguala José Luis Abarca and who was about to launch his candidacy to succeed him in the next municipal elections.

Both Abarca and Pineda were accused of having links with the Guerreros Unidos criminal group.

Iguala police fired on the first of the buses that approached the celebration, killing one student and seriously injuring another. The affected young people warned their colleagues from the other buses, so that they could go to rescue the protesters who had fled from the police cordon.

Two more students from this new group were killed by police fire and even a bus belonging to a third division soccer team that was returning from a game was attacked around midnight on September 26, causing the death of three people, when it was mistaken for with student transportation.

The next day, 57 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School were reported missing, allegedly kidnapped by members of the Iguala municipal police, but 14 of them turned out to be safe in their homes. The fate of the remaining 43 remains an enigma that is far from clear.

Confusing versions, confessions under torture and serious omissions

Two mass graves were found in the course of the initial search, but no link could be established between the remains found and the disappeared.

On October 13, today’s detainee Murillo Karam gave a press conference in which he explained that the young detainees had been handed over by the Iguala police to the Cocula police, the neighboring municipality, and that the police in turn left them in hands of the Guerreros Unidos group, by order of Mayor Abarca.

His version was based on testimonies obtained under torture from the brothers Osvaldo and Miguel Ángel Ríos Sánchez, who would have acted on the orders of Ángel Casarrubias Salgado, leader of Guerreros Unidos. He would have ordered the death of the young men on the understanding that several of them were members of the rival Los Rojos cartel.

On November 7, Murillo Karam cited accounts from other Guerreros Unidos elements, who also spoke under torture, that the students had been executed, their bodies cremated in a garbage dump, and the ashes thrown into a river.

Five years later, investigations by the Attorney General’s Office showed that the Attorney General’s Office had systematically used torture to solve the crime. Some directly involved could not be charged precisely because of this, and others, such as Gildardo López Astudillo, who would be the regional head of Guerreros Unidos, became protected witnesses.

The parents of the disappeared youths have permanently rejected the actions surrounding the case, questioning the scant scientific support of some claims, such as the cremation of the bodies. Until a couple of years ago, forensic studies had managed to prove the identity of only one of the victims, Cristian Rodríguez, and valuable criminal elements were not timely submitted to an expert opinion, such as a bag with a kilo of alleged evidence collected in the area where allegedly bodies were burned.

Truth Commission has the goal of doing justice

President López Obrador decreed on December 4, 2018 the creation of a Truth Commission, in which relatives of the young people were included. A year and a half later, the Attorney General’s Office put an end to the so-called “historical truth”, the versions irregularly obtained by the Attorney General’s Office, and issued an arrest warrant against the former president of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón.

Six years after the massacre, López Obrador met with family members and apologized for the irregularities during the investigation, and last August the Truth Commission declared the disappearance of the students a state crime, upon verifying that the version originally given by the Attorney General’s Office, it had been designed “at the highest levels of the federal government”, at that time under the responsibility of Enrique Peña Nieto.

Intercepts of telephone messages have revealed that several of the students were detained in military institutions and that at least six of them (the others with specified identities) would have died by order of Colonel José Rodríguez Pérez, then commander of the Army base in Iguala.

New evidence has shown an involvement not originally declared by the Army, which would have even infiltrated an element within the group of students. In addition, it has been shown that the military would have provided weapons and training to criminal groups such as Guerreros Unidos.

There is no final conviction in this case, 50 people are in prison awaiting trial and arrest warrants have been issued against another 80.

With EFE and AP