It is still not too late to hold their hands up, admit the serious mistakes made to date and re-direct investigations into the disappearances.
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“We will march with energy”.
The parents arrived for the meeting in a Mexico City museum a few 18 hours into a 43-hour fast that they launched ahead of Saturday’s first anniversary of the mass disappearance. He mentioned that a next step could be drafting a letter to UC faculty and Chancellor Nicholas Dirks to ask for their support in denouncing the Mexican government’s lack of transparency in dealing with the Ayotzinapa case.
Ever since then, the case has lingered as a symbol of corruption and impunity in Mexico, where at least 25,000 people have been disappeared since 2007 alone. 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.
But the official account of events is riddled with holes and inconsistencies. The only certainty this adds is that the government knows far more than what it is letting out.
A team of global experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported on a large number of shortcomings the government’s investigation following a six-month investigation.
Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer for the parents, said the president had not yet “committed to fulfilling any” of the demands and that the promises made by Pena Nieto were not new.
“We won’t rest, we will be a pebble in his shoes. We won’t go home”, Maria de Jesus Tlatempa, mother of José Eduardo Bartolo Tlatempa, one of the missing students, told Agence France-Presse Wednesday..
Families, friends and supporters of the students have regularly marched to demand that authorities determine what happened to them.
The Mexican government says the students were attacked on the way to a protest and executed by local corrupt police linked to a drug gang in the city of Iguala, and their remains were burned and dumped in a river. – 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.
Men carry memorial wreaths during a march by parents and relatives of 43 missing students and three who were killed, in Iguala, Guerrero State, Mexico, Sunday, September 27, 2015.
For years, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration has not done enough to respond to countless allegations of torture, extrajudicial executions and disappearances. The one in Ayotzinapa is more troublesome than most and counts among its former students Lucio Cabañas, who led armed guerrillas in the mountains of Guerrero state and was killed by the army in 1974.
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Credit: Brett Gundlock/Getty Images Thousands attended the anniversary protests in the capital.
