On September 26 2014, 43 student teachers from a militantly left wing teachers college in Ayotzinapa Mexico disappeared with all evidence pointing to their murder by local, state, and federal police, as well as the military, and a coverup going all the way to then President Enrique Pena Nieto. This week an arrest warrant has went out for his right-hand man, Tomas Zeron and five others, as the wheels of justice slowly grind on. Unfortunately Zeron is still at large. There is some indication that Zeron may now be in Canada.
A Mexican judge issued an arrest warrant for the former head of investigations for the Attorney General’s Office for alleged violations in the investigation of the case of 43 college students who disappeared in 2014, officials said Wednesday.
Tomas Zerón and five other former officials face charges including torture, forced disappearance and judicial misconduct. Three have been arrested and three, including Zerón, are still at large. Zerón oversaw the criminal investigation agency of the Attorney General’s Office and also its forensic work in the case. The students’ bodies have never been found, though a burned bone fragment matched one student.
Many of the suspects arrested in the case were later released, and many claimed they had been tortured by police or the military. The current administration, which took office Dec. 1, 2018, has pledged to re-open the case.
Federal officials who were not authorized to be quoted by name said that a warrant was issued for Zerón’s arrest and that Interpol had been notified to help locate him in case he was outside of Mexico. One of the officials said there were indications that Zerón may have left for Canada in late 2019, but it was unclear whether he later travelled elsewhere.
Zerón’s investigation had long been criticized by the families of the 43 teachers’ college students who disappeared in September 2014 after they were detained by local police in Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero. They were allegedly handed over to a drug gang and slain, and have not been heard from since. Zerón was at the centre of the government’s widely criticized investigation, which has failed to definitively determine what happened to the students. Two independent teams of experts have cast doubt on the insistence of Mexican officials that the students bodies were incinerated in a huge fire at a trash dump.
The students attended the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa. They were in Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, to hijack buses (a long and generally accepted tradition of protest to use for transportation to a rally in Mexico City). They were attacked on the buses by local police and allegedly handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel.
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/americas/2020/03/18/warrant-issued-fo...
ETA: Journalist Anabel Hernández’s book on the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students has done a lot to unmask the extreme level of corruption within the Mexican government, police and military, as the following book. Having read the book, I agree with the following review that its picture of the Mexican state is extremely disturbing.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/07/a-massacre-in-mexico-anabe...
Thanks for this. I was well aware of the massacre and its impact, but it is sometimes hard to follow the backstory.
ETA: Tomas Zeron, a close ally of Pena Nieto (President at the time of the murders), who oversaw the criminal investigation agency of the Attorney General’s Office into the disappearance allegedly was involved in a coverup that involved extrene torture to obtain 'confessions' of the murder of the 43 students, confessions that have now been thrown out as worthless and enabling the guilty to escape. There are also accusations that the Attorney General of Mexico at the time of the killings, Jesús Murillo Karam, was also involved in the coverup.
Zeron came to came to Canada in October 2019 and may still be here. There is an Interpol warrant out for his arrest.
The article below is translated from Spanish.
https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2020/03/18/giraron-orden-de-apreh...
The failure to arrest anyone for the murder of these 43 students has led to violence in Mexico, which is seen in the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wnp4IWulft0
Al Jazeera is reporting that the Mexican government has announed 34 arrest warrants for those involved in the murder of the 43 students. Perhaps the violence against government institutions this week seen in the video in the last post shocked the government into action six years after the murders.
President Obrador has Israel to not protect the former head of criminal investigations, who is believed to live there, from being sent back to Mexico.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-arrest-warrants-may-be-iss...
Here's more on who has been charged.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-violence-ayotzinapa/mexican-so...