Martha Pskowski in Mexico City
Tuesday 26 September marked the three-year anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college. The Archbishop of Acapulco, Guerrero, Leopoldo González González, held a press conference to mark the anniversary and called for Mexican authorities to resolve the case. He said that, “This case, which has been so painful, still is a wound on the national reality, and all efforts must go towards finding the truth.”
On the night of 26 September 2014, the Ayotzinapa students had commandeered buses in Iguala, Guerrero, to reach an annual march in Mexico City marking a 1968 student massacre. Police attacked the students, killing six people, including several bystanders. As the students tried to escape, 43 of them went missing and have not been accounted for since. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the students’ families worked with the Mexican Government to name the International Group of Independent Experts (GIEI for its Spanish initials) to investigate the case.
The GIEI conducted two exhaustive investigations and indicated the participation of the local, and federal police along with the military in the attack and disappearances. The GIEI formally concluded its work in Mexico in 2016. Since then the case has been at a standstill, because the federal Government will not acknowledge certain points of evidence from the GIEI.
The federal Government claims the students were burned to death in a trash dump in Cocula, Guerrero. However, the remains of only one student were identified from the dump in Cocula. Three years since the disappearances, the Ayotzinapa families are demanding the Government investigate new motives and actors, and the possibility that one of the buses the students had commandeered was in fact transporting drugs to the U.S. border.
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