A team of worldwide experts who have been investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican students denounced omissions and the use of torture in the government’s probe of the case.
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According to a study cited in the report, 80 percent of those who were arrested in connection with the case showed signs of having suffered physical violence at the hands of the authorities.
The students were studying at a nearby rural teachers college in the town of Ayotzinapa, and were on their way to Mexico City to participate in the commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre on the night of September 26, 2014, when police officers allegedly blocked some of their buses and opened fire before, in the AP’s phrasing, “supposedly” turning the students over to a local drug cartel.
The 608-page report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights-the fruit of an oft-obstructed, year-long investigation-was unveiled “at an emotional press conference on Sunday attended by some of the relatives of the missing students”, according to VICE.
“It is a lie the way they said they caught us”, said Patricio Reyes Landa in testimony the report made public.
Among their other findings in their 608-page report, the experts said they had uncovered new evidence that pointed to a greater role by federal security forces in the events of September 26-27, 2014, despite the Mexican authorities’ insistence that the crimes committed that night were local in nature. Although authorities have alleged the students’ cellphones were burned the night they were killed, the investigators found that some phones were active for months after the disappearance.
The experts charged that the Mexican government had erected “structural barriers” to their investigation, by stonewalling requests for evidence, replying to the panel’s inquiries with formal rather than substantive responses and a refusal to pursue lines of investigation.
The Government’s conclusion, what the former Attorney-General called the “historic truth”, that the students were burned in the trash dump in the hills above the town of Cocula, has been refuted by the experts and an Argentine forensic team did not find evidence that a fire large enough to consume 43 bodies occurred there.
One said police put a rag up his nose and poured water on his face. The experts were denied a request from the families to extend their mandate and continue with their investigation.
The remains of just one of the 43 students has been identified from a charred bone fragment.
IACHR has said it will not renew the experts’ term because the government was opposed to an extension. “These different situations aren’t casual barriers, they are structural barriers to the investigation”.
While the experts’ probe showed that the municipal police were the main culprits of the detention and disappearance of the students, they said the federal police should also be investigated.
The experts´ report notes that medical exams of detainees who said they were tortured were inadequate and did not meet global standards.
Last week it was reported that Mexico’s Army withheld crucial evidence from the experts, including photographs and video footage recorded as police clashed with the students, and that investigators have not been allowed to question soldiers on duty that night in the city where the students disappeared.
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The suspects were usually detained “peacefully”, but bruises appeared in medical reports after their arrests and some claimed to have received electric shocks on their tongues and genitals.
