Share

Mexico to create new prosecutor for missing student case

About a dozen people marched through downtown Friday, in protest of the Mexican government’s investigation following the disappearance of 43 students one year ago.

Advertisement

More than 25,000 people have disappeared between 2007 and July 2015 in the country. The students’ disappearance on September 26, 2014, brought the issue back into the spotlight.

The families’ demands include establishing an internationally supervised investigation of the students’ disappearances and an investigation into officials who undertook the first enquiry.

The protest took place on Wednesday, a day before the parents’ meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto ahead of the case’s anniversary, The Rakyat Post reported.

Presidential spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said Pena Nieto signed the document and ordered the attorney general’s office, as well as the interior and foreign ministries, to analyse it.

The parents have been asking for essentially the same things, among others.

Earlier on Thursday, families of the missing students had presented eight demands to the government.

The president has so far declined to authorize a new global probe or to even review the previous investigation. Gonzalez said, surrounded by other parents in Mexico City’s central plaza. “And if you’re a parent of missing child – until there’s evidence to the contrary – you would believe they’re alive”, said Amaral. He said the case of the 43 missing students requires its own special prosecutor.

“We didn’t ask for any of this and we do not agree that this will resolve anything”, Rosales said.

The students, who are from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Guerrero’s southern state, disappeared after local police in the city of Iguala attacked them.

Police intercepted the buses on the road between the cities of Morelia and Patzcuaro, leading to clashes between the students and law enforcement officers, reportedly involving the use of stones and tear gas.

The media attention given to the case of the missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a nearby teachers’ college in Guerrero state, has led numerous families to break the silence they had maintained out of fear of reprisals and denounce the disappearance of their loved ones and even look for them amid the mountainous terrain.

The government has said that it has identified two of the students from the burned remains recovered from a river in Cocula.

Advertisement

The IACHR experts based their conclusions on a study by a fire expert, which discarded the possibility that 43 bodies could have been burnt in the area as the government had originally concluded. Independent human rights organisations have dismissed the government’s investigations.

Mexico parents of 43 missing students reject President's response to demands