Q. Why does this case still matter?
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Indeed, said Guevara-Rosas said on Sunday: “By refusing to follow up all possible lines of investigation, manipulating evidence, failing to protect and support the student’s relatives…and even failing to attend today’s presentation, the Mexican authorities are sending the unsafe message that anyone can disappear in Mexico and nothing will be done about it”. An estimated 26,000 people have gone missing since 2006, and 94 percent of crimes go unsolved.
Mexico scholars, lawyers and others I spoke to in recent days marveled at how much had changed for the worse from just two years ago, when President Enrique Peña Nieto was hailed on the cover of Time as his country’s savior.
Parents of the 43 missing Mexican students continue to criticize the government’s investigation calling it a cover-up.
The students were put into police cars and and haven’t been seen since. “We call for the completion of a full and transparent investigation of the students’ disappearances and the prosecution of all those responsible”, he said. “The case is not closed”.
Reuters reported last week 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. Regarding the assertion that the students were collectively incinerated, the experts repeated their long-held position that this was not the case.
It also set out a number of seeming inconsistencies, including a text message from one student an hour after officials say the victims were killed and suggestions that evidence was planted.
The human rights group commissioned the panel to help find out what happened to the students from a rural teachers’ college who went missing in the Mexican city of Iguala while on a trip to raise money for activities.
The 608-page report commissioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was released Sunday and is the latest chapter in a saga that unfolded on September 26, 2014.
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, whose work has led to high-profile prosecutions against the Colombian military, a Guatemalan dictator and American oil companies, not only provided the most chilling account of what the students had suffered one night in September 2014, but it also showed that the Mexican government had, at the very least, badly mishandled the investigation, and quite possibly attempted a cover-up. The group has already dismissed the notion that the bodies were disposed of in a giant pyre.
The experts say that the government’s fire theory is scientifically impossible given the heat needed to reduce human remains to ash. He acknowledges that he visited the scene October 28, but he said Wednesday no evidence was picked up that day.
Experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights studied the case and said there are problems with the way the Mexican government presented the case’s timeline.
“This report is devastating for Mexico’s global reputation”.
Does this mean the case is closed?
The allegations could damage the chance of convicting any of the suspects as Mexican judges are instructed to throw out confessions based on torture.
He thanked the commission for their work, and said it proved that Mexico was prepared to open its doors to “international scrutiny”.
“The investigation had difficulties that are not attributable exclusively to the simple complexity of a case of this magnitude”, the report said. “It could choose to look for a new strategy, to take the advice and guidance of the independent investigators, or it could maintain its position and consolidate around” its initial explanation.
The worldwide investigators say their job is far from complete.
Is there any silver lining?
The GIEI, for example, “has shown the Mexican public that you can do sophisticated criminal investigations”, she says.
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But the “significant evidence of torture and abuse” of the suspects was the report’s most damning element.
