#43 missing students

By Paulina Villegas, NY Times, Sept. 3, 2018

AYOTZINAPA, Mexico--Four years after the disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico, the case remains unsolved, international human rights groups said Monday, as they called on the next president to conduct a proper investigation.

The case of the missing students prompted global outrage and shook Mexico to its core, plunging President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval ratings to new lows. At a ceremony on Monday at their school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, representatives from several rights groups said their disappearance had still not been explained.

The official account, disputed by international experts, is that the students were kidnapped by local police officers who turned them over to a drug gang. The gang killed them and burned their bodies in a nearby garbage dump, leaving no remains.

“The commission does not accept that narrative,” said Esmeralda Arosemena de Troitiño, rapporteur for Mexico at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. “No more talk about what they describe as ‘historic truth,’ because it hurts us, it outrages us and the families of the victims simply do not tolerate it.”

Ms. Arosemena said the commission hoped that President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1, would take advantage of the change in government to open an independent investigation. He defeated the candidate from Mr. Peña Nieto’s party in the July election.

Mr. López Obrador has repeatedly said that he is committed to further investigating the case with the help of international human rights organizations and making sure that “justice is done.”

“The doors of the country will be opened,” he said last month. “There will be no obstruction or obstacles that will keep us from discovering the truth in the Ayotzinapa case.”

The rights groups said a new investigation should examine the role of the federal police and the military in the students’ disappearance, possible obstruction of the investigation by government officials, and accusations that at least 34 of the 129 people arrested in connection with the case had been tortured.

Representatives from the commission, the United Nations and Mexico’s top human rights agency appeared Monday at Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, where the missing students, many of them sons of farmers, were training to become rural teachers in hope of escaping lives of poverty. The male-only school has a history of leftist activism, with students using radical tactics like blocking roads and throwing rocks at police officers.

At the school’s basketball court, 43 empty chairs were lined up behind the podium to represent the missing young men. A crowd of current students invoked the date the students disappeared, chanting: “September the 26th will not be forgotten. Alive they took them, alive we want them back!”

On that night in 2014, about 100 students left the school to hijack several buses for transportation to a march in Mexico City, a longstanding tradition that was mostly tolerated by bus companies and law enforcement officials.

But this time, police officers and other gunmen pursued the stolen buses and opened fire on the students in a coordinated assault in and around the city of Iguala. Six people were killed and dozens wounded. The 43 missing students, who had been pulled off two of the buses, were last seen being taken away by the police. The remains of only one have been identified.

The case became emblematic of the tens of thousands of disappearances during Mexico’s decade-long drug war, bringing protesters into the streets by the thousands and throwing Mr. Peña Nieto’s presidency into crisis.

Last week, ahead of his final state of the union address, Mr. Peña Nieto said in a video released on Twitter that his administration stood by the official findings. He said it was understandable the victims’ parents could not accept the painful truth--a remark that caused indignation among the victims’ families and human rights groups.

International investigators arrived in 2015 at the invitation of the Mexican government. But after they contradicted the official version of events, they said, the government began a campaign of harassment and stonewalling that made it impossible for them to do their work. The investigators left the following year.

In June, a federal court ordered the Mexican government to investigate the case again, calling the first inquiry “neither prompt, effective, independent nor impartial.” The court ordered that the new investigation be supervised by a truth commission to be led by Mexico’s human rights body and victims’ families, who have already waited years for answers.

“Anger is all I can feel,” said Delfina de la Cruz, mother of Adán Abraham de la Cruz, who was 24 when he went missing. She was at the school on Monday, along with at least one relative of each of the 43 missing students.

Mexico’s New President Andrés Manuel López Obrador Creates Truth Commission, Restarts Investigation Into Disappearance of 43 Students

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico created a truth commission on Monday to re-examine the case of 43 students whose disappearance in 2014, still unsolved after a disputed investigation, has come to represent the tens of thousands of Mexicans who have vanished in more than a decade of the drug war.

(more…)

The Ghosts of Ayotzinapa Return to Haunt Enrique Peña Nieto

On the night of September 26, 2014, some 43 students from the rural teaching school of Ayotzinapa were disappeared in the city of Iguala, Guerrero while commandeering buses to attend a protest in Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 student massacre. The Peña Nieto administration – in a version of events that then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam deemed to be the verdad histórica, or “historic…

June 26th, 2016   Thousands of protesters gather in Mexico City in support of teachers in Oaxaca, whose protests in the small city of Nochixtlan against the privatization of public education and other harmful education reforms were met with state violence, leaving 12 dead. Protestors also recalled the 43 missing students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Iguala, who went missing on September 26th, 2014.

Source 1

New Post has been published on https://fsrn.org/2015/11/slideshow-body-of-ayotzinapa-student-exhumed-for-independent-autopsy/

Slideshow: Body of Ayotzinapa student exhumed for independent autopsy

Mexican authorities have exhumed the body of Ayotzinapa student Julio Cesar Mondragón. The move comes after months of pressure from his family and per recommendations from a group of experts affiliated with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that authorities permit an independent autopsy. Experts from the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team will perform the autopsy at the request of the family.

The body of the 22-year-old student was found along a dirt road in the Mexican city of Iguala, Guerrero on the morning of September 27, 2014,  after the abduction of 43 of his classmates. The body was left without facial skin, eyes or ears and bearing other signs of apparent torture. The official autopsy concluded that area fauna were responsible for the state in which his body was left, despite the fact that no tooth or beak marks were found. The relatives who identified him in the morgue say Mondragón was clearly tortured and murdered.

When the federal government concluded its initial investigation into the fate of the missing students, announcing that all had been killed and incinerated in an open air dump, no mention was made of Julio Cesar Mondragón nor explanation given about the state in which his body was found.

On Saturday in Mexico City, Mondragón’s family and supporters marched from the the Three Cultures Plaza, site of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, to the Government Forensic Institute. Outside of the government building, students and activists created an enormous altar with Julio Cesar’s face as part of the cultural act “Julio Soy Tu Rostro” or “Julio, I am your face.”

FSRN’s Andalusia Knoll was there and files this photo essay.

Click any thumbnail image to launch slideshow with captions.

Family members of Julio Cesar Mondragón and relatives of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students led the march as it snaked through residential neighborhoods on its way to the Mexican government’s central forensics institute.

The young widow of Julio Cesar, Marisa Mendoza Cacahuatzin, led the march. Their baby was born just two weeks before Julio Cesar’s murder.

Freshmen from the new class of the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college watch as musicians perform songs for Julio Cesar Mondragón.

Participants holding candles created a solemn mood during the march and cultural event held in memory of Julio Cesar Mondragón.

“Julio Cesar, I am your face.” Supporters create a Day of the Dead style “tapete” painting with sand, sawdust and powdered vegetable-based dyes so that he can be remembered as the young smiling student that he was rather than the disfigured murder victim shown in photos hat went viral online when his body was found.

In a symbolic act outside of the federal forensics institute building, students reconstructed Julio Cesar’s face with painted sawdust which is traditionally used in Day of the Dead altars.