Former Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo was arrested this Friday (19) accused of disrupting investigations into the disappearance of 43 students in 2014. Murillo, the highest-ranking former public official detained in the case, was the one who oversaw the inquiry, criticized by experts and the current government.
The former prosecutor served from 2012 to 2015, when Enrique Peña Nieto led the country in a center-right government. When asked about the investigations surrounding his role, Murrillo said he was satisfied and open to questioning. In addition to obstruction of justice, he will answer for torture and enforced disappearance.
Murillo became a strong name for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years until 2000. The acronym said on Friday that the prison “responds more to a political than a judicial matter.”
The case in question refers to the disappearance of students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa, most of whom are teenagers. Between the night of September 26 and the morning of September 27, the group was heading towards the city of Iguala, in the southwest of the country, to board buses that would take them to demonstrations in the country’s capital.
According to the government’s version of Enrique Peña Nieto, the students disappeared in an action by the Guerreros Unidos cartel, which confused the youths with members of a rival group. The criminal organization would then have killed them and incinerated their bodies in a dump. But international experts pointed to errors and abuses in the inquiry.
On Thursday (18), Mexico’s top human rights official, Alejandro Encinas, accused the government of covering up the disappearance. He cited the relationship of local, state and federal authorities in the episode and classified the incident as a state crime. According to him, the last government “hidden the truth of the facts, altered crime scenes and covered up the authorities’ links with a criminal group”.
Since elected, the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, promises to investigate the predecessor’s version and, if necessary, reveal what actually happened to the students. Under his rule, authorities issued dozens of arrest warrants, including for military and police officers. They also requested the extradition of a former official accused of manipulating the investigation and who is in Israel.
Murillo’s arrest, in fact, took place hours after the current president asked for the names responsible for the disappearance of the students to be released. “Revealing this atrocious, inhumane situation and, at the same time punishing those responsible, helps not to repeat it. May these regrettable events never happen again in our country,” he said.
One of the missing youths was an informant for the military, which, according to the authorities, would require a specific protocol for the investigation – the procedure, however, was not followed. Had they done so, they point out, “the disappearance and murder of the students would have been avoided.”
Despite intense searches, only three students had their remains identified. Since the disappearance, the young people’s families have expressed hope that they survived. On Thursday, Encinas dismissed the hypothesis: “The testimonies and the evidence prove that they were murdered and disappeared cunningly.” “It’s a sad reality,” she said.
