On August 18, to appreciable fanfare, the Mexican authorities launched the report of its “Fact Fee” in regards to the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa rural instructing college students within the southern state of Guerrero in September 2014.
The report concedes that the persecution and disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43 was a “state crime,” involving native officers and army items, and that the federal government of then President Enrique Peña Nieto pursued a deliberate coverage of concealment of the crime and obstruction of justice.
However the report fails to handle the roles within the cover-up of the Mexican Secretariat of Nationwide Protection, the army brass, and the nationwide intelligence company, then referred to as CISEN.
On September 26, 2014, the scholars left Ayotzinapa to participate in an indication in Mexico Metropolis to commemorate the October 2, 1968 bloodbath of scholars by army and federal police and paramilitary items. Their progress was monitored by federal and state police, and an informant infiltrated into their college by the army was alongside for the journey.
When the scholars reached the Metropolis of Iguala, they borrowed an area bus for the remainder of their journey, a typical incidence. It seems the bus had medicine of an area gang on it, the Guerreros Unidos. Municipal police rounded up and arrested the scholars. This a lot is agreed upon.
A handful of the scholars have been killed within the metropolis, and the remainder have been handed by police over to the gang, who burned their our bodies at a landfill website close to the neighboring city of Cocula. No less than this was the model of occasions promoted by the Peña Nieto authorities, which it dubbed the “historic fact.”
Actually, the investigation on the time was tormented by irregularities and human rights violations. As a substitute of searching for the reality, the federal investigation sought to hide it, and significantly the position of the army and federal police in these occasions.
An Interdisciplinary Group of Unbiased Specialists (GIEI) was appointed by the Inter-American Fee on Human Rights in 2015, which questioned the official model of occasions from its inception, and offered exhaustive criticisms of the investigations carried out. Based mostly on forensic evaluation, the GIEI flatly rejected the speculation that the scholars had been cremated, on the grounds that it was unimaginable within the circumstances described by the Mexican authorities.
The GIEI’s efforts in 2015 and 2016 additionally revealed the Mexican authorities’s falsification of data, destruction of proof, and systematic use of torture towards detainees and suspects all through the official investigation.
For years, the mother and father of the Ayotzinapa 43 pursued the reality, whereas holding onto slim hopes that a few of the college students may nonetheless be alive. They staged steady marches and protests, and the Mexican inhabitants general supported their quest for justice.
Shortly after he got here into workplace in December 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, referred to as AMLO, introduced the formation of the “Fee for Fact and Entry to Justice.” A particular unit within the federal Legal professional Common’s Workplace was set as much as handle the investigation.
The Fact Fee proceeded at a tortoise tempo over the subsequent three and a half years, reflecting continued resistance within the greater echelons of the state. This tempo and lack of outcomes additional pissed off the Ayotzinapa mother and father, extending their grief.
In March 2022, the GIEI offered its third report on the case, exposing intimately the involvement of high-level authorities officers and establishments within the cover-up. Its revelations included documentation of the Mexican army’s infiltration and surveillance of the Ayotzinapa Rural Academics School earlier than, throughout and after the occasions in Iguala in September of 2014, in addition to the manipulation of the alleged Cocula crime scene by members of the Mexican Navy, the department of the army popularly thought of because the least corrupt in Mexico.
The GIEI concluded that the army and police collaborated with gangs to kidnap and bloodbath the scholars; that “all info was obtained via torture” by the Ministry of Protection; and that the arrest warrants issued have been “falsified.” It additionally discovered that 20 key witnesses, together with a number of suspects, had been murdered.
Lastly, this month, AMLO’s authorities belatedly launched the report of its Fact Fee. The report conceded that the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa trainer coaching college students was in truth a “state crime,” and its investigation was a deliberate cover-up.
Because the report was launched, different grisly details have emerged. For instance, Human Rights Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas let slip that six of the 43 school college students “disappeared” in 2014 have been stored alive in a warehouse for days after which turned over to the native military commander, Col. José Rodriguez Pérez, who ordered them killed.
On August 19, on the request of the federal Legal professional Common, an arrest warrant was issued towards the previous federal Public Prosecutor, Jesus Murillo Karam, thought of the architect of the preliminary investigation and its “Historic Fact” falsification.
Warrants have been additionally requested and issued towards 20 native army commanders and army personnel from the twenty seventh and forty first Battalions within the metropolis of Iguala, in addition to 5 administrative and judicial officers from the state of Guerrero; 26 police officers from the close by municipality of Huitzuco; six from Iguala and one from Cocula; plus 11 state police officers from Guerrero and 14 members of the felony group Guerreros Unidos.
Aside from Murrillo Karam, a sacrificial lamb of kinds, the search warrants lengthen solely to native officers and officers.
Regardless of subsequently calling for “endurance,” AMLO declared that the findings of the fee don’t even “advantage an investigation” of Peña Nieto himself. Furthermore, no motion has been hinted at towards the pinnacle of safety of the Mexico Metropolis authorities managed by AMLO’s Morena social gathering, Omar Harfuch. Implicated within the prosecution listening to towards Karam for collaborating within the October 7, 2014 assembly with Karam and different high officers the place the “historic fact” was born, Harfuch was additionally head of the Federal Police in Guerrero through the Ayotzinapa occasions.
Likewise, conspicuously absent from any scrutiny or prosecution are those that sat on the highest ranges of the protection ministry, the army chiefs, and within the nationwide intelligence company. It will beggar perception to conclude that these layers weren’t totally knowledgeable of the true course of occasions in 2014, and significantly as to the position of the native army items within the homicide of the scholars. At minimal, they lined up, however they maintain impunity.
Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, who was the Secretary of Protection underneath Peña Nieto, that’s, through the time of the Ayotzinapa killings and cover-up, is one in all them. In 2005-2007, Cienfuegos commanded the IXth Navy Area, headquartered in Acapulco, Guerrero. He allegedly protected the Sinaloa Cartel (headed by “Chapo” Guzman) and the associated Beltrán-Leyva Cartel (headed by Guzman’s cousins), which managed the Guerrero area on the time.
In November 2020, AMLO pressured the US to launch Cienfuegos, regardless of clear proof that he was being paid to guard and immediately facilitate drug shipments by the H-2 cartel, a Beltran-Leyva offshoot. As soon as the Trump administration dropped the costs and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico, AMLO exonerated him.
Extra typically, these layers are protected as a result of AMLO’s rule more and more rests upon the Mexican army. He created a militarized Nationwide Guard which he now seeks to maneuver from the Public Safety Ministry to the Protection Ministry. And he’s searching for to increase the home deployment of the Army and Navy past the 2024 restrict that he decreed in 2020.
These strikes reveal an authoritarian course on AMLO’s half, and in the end his reliance on the army to suppress any menace of working class unrest.
Ayotzinapa is a robust image of state-sponsored criminality in Mexico, and a decades-long historical past of its authorities’s suppression of standard resistance to class oppression.
It reveals the injustice and impunity emblematic of the pervasive drawback of pressured disappearances that happen each day all through the nation, which exceeded 100,000 folks underneath Peña Nieto, and have solely elevated underneath López Obrador.
