another anniversary of the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students

Seven years, 2556 days, of research the 43 Ayotzinapa students disappeared between the night of 26 and the early morning of September 27, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, in southern Mexico.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has vowed to bring justice to the families, but the lack of clarification on what happened during the attacks discourages the illusion of loved ones.

On top of that, the case gets even more complicated as the dark side of the case, the attempted cover-up, begins to emerge, and the chances of knowing what happened to the young students on the tragic night are even greater. distant. .

On the eve of this new anniversary, a group of family, friends and neighbors demonstrated in front of the headquarters of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, demand concrete progress in the search.

This Friday, relatives were received by the president López Obrador and out of the meeting the families’ lawyer, Vidulfo Rosales, said: “We recognize that there is progress, but there are obstacles presented by institutions such as the prosecutor’s office or the defense secretary.

Criticism of the role of Mexico’s attorney general is due to the slowness in arresting some of those involved, a move that generates anger and helplessness among the mothers and fathers of the 43 students, who have lost in the past two months. of their members. , Saúl Bruno García and Bernardo Campos, parents of two of the youngsters.

According to reports, around 30 arrests are underway, including those of the former director of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, who was in charge of the case during the first stage of the investigation and who has an arrest warrant after that. transcended a series of videos in which he practiced torture with detainees.

Special Prosecutor Omar Gómez reported that the National Intelligence Center delivered 40 videos where his predecessors are seen torturing detainees. For this reason, the Mexican government has sent Israel an extradition request for Zerón, who is currently a refugee in that country.

But everything seems to go against the search for the 43 students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa, who were reported missing by the criminal organization Guerreros Unidos and the police, according to suspicions.

What little could be determined about what happened in 2014 is that the group of students traveled in five buses to a demonstration commemorating a massacre of students.

In the middle of the journey they were attacked, some versions claim that by a criminal group in the region, others say that by public forces, others by the two in collusion.

It is estimated that they were around 100 Ayotzinapa students. The events happened during the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), who built a version of the events he called “historical truth”.

According to this version, the missing youths were handed over by the police to a criminal group known as Guerreros Unidos, who they murdered the young people, cremated them and threw them his remains to a nearby river.

However, the parents rejected the version and asked for clarification on the case from López Obrador, who assumed the presidency of Mexico in December 2018 and promised to clarify the disappearance of the students.

In a recent statement, prosecutor Omar Gómez said the “historical truth” of Peña Nieto’s government was fabricated by torturing witnesses.

“All the people who were presented by the public prosecutor at the time as the material authors of the disappearance and the execution of the 43 students, were exonerated by court order to have sufficient evidence that they were tortured, ”Gómez Trejo explained.

Emiliano Navarrete, member of the Fathers and Mothers Committee of 43, called on the federal government to provide answers on the plight of young people. During the seizure of the Autopista del Sol México toll booths in Acapulco on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of the tragedy, he questioned the tasks of seeking justice and warned “They are not going to cheat us with searches, we want results. “

Extradition request to Israel

For his part, President López Obrador asked Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett this Sunday, arrest and extradition of the former director of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, accused of torturing witnesses and fabricating evidence in the case of the 43 students of a school in Ayotzinapa who disappeared in 2014.

The Mexican government’s Under-Secretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration, Alejandro Encinas Rodríguez, reported the request by letter from López Obrador, after seeing the videos in which Zerón appears submitting witnesses to inhuman treatment and giving instructions.

The man is shown to have accused tortured and falsified evidence by investigating the disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training college.

In addition, Encinas recalled that so far 21 key people have been killed in the disappearance of the students, a significant loss of information sources to clarify the case, according to local media Proceso.

El caso más reciente es el del líder de Guerreros Unidos, Juan Salgado Guzmán, acusado de participar directamente en la desaparición, quien resistió a balazos a ser detenido el jueves pasado y fue ejecutado por la policía mexicana en Metepec, at 60 kilómetros de Ciudadadición from Mexico.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government announced that it was working on two new searches to locate the remains of the youths.

Since January 2019, they have carried out 55 search actions in 136 different points of seven municipalities of Guerrero, a Mexican state south of the capital, where the bodies of three missing students have already been found and identified: Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, Alexander Mora Venancio and Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz.

With agency information

GRB