Seven Years After Ayotzinapa, Families of Missing Students Call for More Progress in Iconic Case | Only three of the 43 youths have been identified and one of the most suspicious ex-officials remains at large in Israel

“Where are they?”, asked again this Sunday the relatives of the 43 students of the rural school of Ayotzinapa who disappeared between September 26 and 27, 2014 in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero. “Neither with tanks nor shrapnel, Ayotzi does not shut up”shouted hundreds of normal school students who shared their pain during the mobilizations in Mexico City and other parts of the country. Seven years after one of the greatest human rights tragedies in Mexican history, the remains of only three of the 43 youths have been identified and the main investigator of the case in the previous government, Tomás Zerón, remains a fugitive in Israel.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced to families a few days ago missing students work on two new searches for remains. In addition, government officials of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) who sought to get rid of the case on the basis of a false account of events constructed from the torture of witnesses, still make the claim. under investigation. However, satiety begins to surface in families, also affected by the recent coronavirus death of two parents, Saúl Bruno and Bernardo Campos. “Although this government made a commitment from the start to resolve the Ayotzinapa case, that does not mean that there has been a lot of progress. And it’s worrying because the six-year term (presidential term) leaves us, and over time, it is more difficult to arrive at the truth “, explains the Page 12 Manuel Vazquez Arellano, one of the survivors of the tragedy.

The wreckage that collapsed historical truth

According to the government version of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the 43 students of the rural school of Ayotzinapa were arrested on the night of September 26, 2014 by the Iguala police, who handed them over to the Guerreros cartel. Unidos, who murdered them and cremated them in the Cocula landfill, dumping the remains into a nearby river, the San Juan. This story, known as the “historical truth”, was questioned by relatives and by an investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) which indicated that the bodies could not be burned in this place .

The López Obrador government has definitely overturned this version by identifying the unburned remains of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez in 2020 and Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz in June this year., both in the Carnicería ravine, outside the landfill. From Rodríguez it was a fragment of the foot that weighed barely a gram, from Guerrero a lumbar vertebra. These two identifications are added to that of Alexander Mora Venancio, whose remains were found in the San Juan River in 2014. “These steps in the right direction, that we, as a human rights organization, can understand that they are going in the right direction, since From the perspective of families who have been waiting for the truth for seven years, he knows very little“, warns this newspaper Santiago aguirre, director of the Human Rights Center Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez (Prodh).

The Truth and Access to Justice Commission for the Ayotzinapa case, headed by Alejandro Encinas, assume that the students have never been together in the same place and that criminals and security forces of all levels were involved in the disappearance, not just the municipal police. Encinas sostiene que el fin del viaje de los estudiantes no era interrumpir un acto de la presidenta del sistema de Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF) de Iguala, María de los Ángeles Pineda, esposa del entonces alcalde José Luis Abarca, como se quiso presentar initially.

In reality of young people between 17 and 25 years old were looking for groups to settle in Mexico on October 2. This day 46 years of the Tlatelolco massacre have been commemorated, where military and parapolic officers fiercely suppressed a student protest, killing at least 300 people. For Aguirre it’s clear that historical truth “was postulated as the closing story of the case, more for a political decision than on the basis of evidence and more for a motivation to quell all the social outrage that had aroused in Mexico. “

Arrest and fugitive warrants

A year ago, on the sixth anniversary of the tragedy, President López Obrador announced that for the first time arrest warrants were being issued against the military in this case and shortly thereafter Captain José Martínez Crespo was arrested. But while they appreciate the efforts of the Truth Commission and the specialized prosecutor, Omar Gómez, relatives of missing students understand that the general prosecutor’s office is slow to make arrests and that the army is hiding information.

“We have to fulfill the arrest warrants. It is good that there is signage of key persons, but also we find that many of these key people have been murdered in recent months“, he comments Vazquez Arellano. The numbers are impressive: Of the 89 arrest warrants for the Ayotzinapa case, 40 are still pending.. In addition, at least 21 people linked to the case have died or been murdered.

The arrest warrants include, in addition to possible perpetrators, former government officials who designed the historical truth. Last Friday, during a meeting between the government and the families, Lopez Obrador announced that sent a letter to the Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, to expedite the delivery of Tomás Zerón, who fled to this country with which Mexico does not have an extradition treaty.

Director of the defunct Criminal Investigation Agency, Zerón is accused of having constructed historical truth by fabricating evidence and torturing suspects and witnesses. “It is essential to investigate torture, especially since in Mexico torture continues with a lot of recurrence, being a widespread investigative practice in the prosecutor’s offices in the country which generally remains unpunished,” Aguirre said to this regard.

A recurring story

The case of Ayotzinapa is emblematic in a country which is going through a serious crisis with over 90,000 people missing since 1964, the vast majority after 2007. “There is still a very high number of disappearances in recent years, and we do not yet see a serious effort on the part of the Mexican state to deal with this crisis.”, Remarks Aguirre. For the director of the Prodh Center, the vast majority of the missing occurred “after the intensification of the war on drug trafficking. and Mexico has been plunged into the crisis of violence in which we are. ”

Manuel Vázquez Arellano, one of Ayotzinapa’s survivors, for a long time he called himself Omar García to protect his identity from the threats he had received since the night of September 26. Months ago Vázquez Arellano He was elected federal deputy by the Morena decision. This is why his analysis of what can happen in the case does not exclude the political sphere: “If the ‘priistas’ or ‘panistas’ (opposition parties) return to power, the case is closed. If the government of the Fourth Transformation continues, it will be necessary to see how the investigation continues, whether on the same terms as it currently is or with more force than the families deserve. “