eight soldiers arrested for the case of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa

Eight soldiers linked to the disappearance of the 43 student teachers in Ayotzinapa, in southern Mexico in 2014, were arrested and are in a military prison awaiting a civil judge to determine whether to open criminal proceedings against them, reported Thursday to AP an Army commander.

According to the soldier, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to make public statements, the eight uniformed officers allegedly involved in the well-known “Ayotzinapa case” are still active and were arrested on Wednesday at the request of the federal prosecutor’s office.

In September of last year, the federal prosecutor’s office issued arrest warrants against 16 members of the military and shortly after withdrew them without giving any explanation. This led to the resignation of the prosecutor handling the case and strong condemnations, both from the international experts who are accompanying the investigations and from the Prodh Center of lawyers for the victims, who considered that it was an arbitrary decision due to “illegal interference” in the investigations. .

Now, those arrest warrants have been reactivated, but only eight members of the Mexican Army have been arrested, accused by the Prosecutor’s Office of forced disappearance, indicated Santiago Aguirre, director of the Prodh Center.

“Until all the orders are fulfilled and until they are formally imprisoned, we will know if this is serious,” said the lawyer. If the Prosecutor’s Office manages to prosecute them, a new possibility of advancing justice would open up, he added.

The judge handling the case should decide on the matter in the coming days.

On September 26, 2014, police from the city of Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero, captured a group of student teachers from the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa, with the participation of other local, state, and federal security forces. and members of organized crime.

The final fate of the young people is still unknown, although small skeletal remains of three of the students have been recovered.

According to the current Prosecutor’s Office, members of the Armed Forces participated directly in the events and presumably also in subsequent activities of concealment of data and obstruction of justice.

Four members of the military are being prosecuted in the case, but the lawyers for the victims and the international experts who collaborate with the investigation under the mandate of the Organization of American States (OAS) have spent years denouncing that there are more involved within the Armed Forces, an area which Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has given more and more power in recent years.

The OAS group denounced in March that the Army continued to hide key information and evidence from them to clarify what had happened, which meant a significant blockage to their work. His term ends at the end of July and it is not yet clear if it will be extended, as it has been in the past.

The motive for the attack on the students remains unclear, but the idea has been established that it would be linked to heroin trafficking by a criminal group in collusion with local authorities and presumably also with the military, according to information provided by US authorities to the case.

The numerous irregularities registered in the investigation during the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) caused many accusations to be dropped for violations of due process and some of those involved were released.

One of the last to be exonerated, although he is still in jail for other crimes, was José Luis Abarca, who was mayor of Iguala when the events occurred.

The highest-ranking person involved in prison is the then Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, who is being prosecuted for forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice, being considered by the current Prosecutor’s Office as the one who invented the official version of the previous government to cover up the truth.

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