Brigida Olivares has lived in a classroom at her grandson’s rural teacher college in southern Mexico since the young man and 42 other students vanished previous year.
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Thousands gather to mark the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students with a march in Mexico City, Saturday, September 26, 2015.
Through it all, the day-to-day reminders of his son’s disappearance keep the loss fresh: no extra hands to fix their old taxi, a fragile grandmother who still does not know that he is gone, a daughter without her closest sibling.
Parents have met with the Mexican President, and they say they believe their sons are alive.
In a meeting with the parents of the 43 missing students earlier this week, the president, Enrique Peña Nieto promised to create a special prosecutors’ office to investigate all of Mexico’s disappearances. – Mexican authorities’ “reckless handling” of the investigation into the disappearance of 43 teacher trainees a year ago exposes “a scandalous cover-up orchestrated by the highest levels of government”, London-based human rights group Amnesty global said.
“Those people are cold blooded and their eyes say it all”, said Carmen Mendoza, the mother of missing Ayotzinapa student Jorge Anibal Cruz referring to the president.
“We are in a situation without exit because there won’t be a version of the events that will be accepted by everybody”, Jose Antonio Crespo, political professor at the Economics Research and Teaching Center, told AFP.
This was the “historic truth”, the attorney general said smugly.
In the 365 days that went by since that tragic night, the lid has been lifted on Mexico’s state of play when it comes to human rights.
The official investigation reported that the students were handed over to the local drug cartel which later killed them, burned their bodies at a dump and threw their remains in plastic bags into a river.
Backed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a leading intergovernmental group in Washington, the investigation found possible torture of detainees, lost evidence and other significant holes in official claims. The theory is the students became unwittingly involved in drug trafficking (one of the buses they commandeered may have had drugs on board), and that state and federal security forces failed to protect them.
Noting that Mexican authorities have prohibited independent experts from interviewing soldiers of the 27th infantry battalion, based in the town where the students were arrested, Guevara-Rosas said that action “raises alarming questions”. Since December only two of the students have been identified, and in both cases the families disbelieve the official story. Gonzalez said, surrounded by other parents in Mexico City’s central plaza.
As he stood on one of the fanciest avenues in all of Latin America, feeling out of place, he said: “I think sometimes people feel sorry for us, for what happened to us, especially since we are very poor”.
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“It would not look good for us to have classes while the parents are here”, said Santiago Garcia, a press secretary for the student council that tacitly leads the college.
