It’s just the tip of the iceberg: the ghost of the 43 students who disappeared in 2014 has returned to haunt Mexico in anticipation of a UN report to be published in mid-April on the total of approximately 100,000 disappearances recorded in the country since 1964.
Mexican authorities have sought to justify themselves following the latest revelations by international, independent experts who have been working for more than seven years on the “Agiojinapa 43” case.
“We have opened the files like never before and we have not hidden anything at all,” Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took over the presidency in 2018, said on Tuesday, referring to the tragedy that occurred during the presidency of Pena Nieto (2012-2018).
In its third report presented Monday, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Specialists (GIEI) accused the Mexican authorities of hiding basic information about the disappearance of 43 students.
The GIEI was set up, with the consent of Mexico, shortly after the disappearance of students in the state of Guerrero.
According to the official account of the authorities, the 43 students were handed over by police to drug dealers of the “Guerreros Unidos” cartel because they believed that they were members of an rival cartel. After they killed them with bullets, burned their remains in a landfill.
The official version of the Mexican authorities is disputed by the families of the students and the GIEI experts.
In their most recent report, experts referred to a previously unknown element of the case, a video taken by a Navy drone.
The video was filmed a month after the events, on October 27, 2014, above the landfill where the students’ corpses are said to have been cremated.
According to the GIEI, it shows more than ten members of the Mexican Navy destroying evidence before the attorney general’s visit. Some even went “deep” into the landfill and lit a “fire”, Proceso magazine reported.
“Making a lie”
“We have ordered an investigation into the Navy leaders who took part in this operation,” Lopez Obrador said.
The case of Agiojinapa has occupied the media around the world as it was the “mass disappearance” of 43 future teachers, commented one of the experts, the Chilean lawyer Francisco Cox.
“The emotion of the international community” as well as “the maneuvering at the highest level in order to fabricate a lie aimed at closing the case” explain why this tragedy has become a symbol of the missing in Mexico, he added.
In its annual report released on Tuesday, Amnesty International denounced the “impunity” of the perpetrators of the kidnappings in Mexico, as the UN Commission on Enforced Disappearances has already done after a delegation’s visit to Mexico in mid-November21.
“In 2021, authorities recorded 7,698 cases of missing persons,” Amnesty International added. “In total, from 1964 until the end of 2021, the total number of complaints about disappearances exceeded 97,000.”
The UN commission is expected to publish its own report in April after participating in November in exhumations and search days organized by the victims’ mothers.
Cox expressed hope that the UN report would help “reduce impunity” for kidnappers in Mexico.
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
