The Massacre and Disappearance of 43 Mexican Students

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Sat, 2020-03-21 00:30

jerrym

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...

Sat, 2020-03-21 00:53

jerrym

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.

Anabel Hernández’s book (first published in Spanish in 2016) rates as one of the most difficult I have encountered in a very long time. Difficult at every level: to believe, to take in the implications, to process the appalling violence and, sadly, in parts, simply to read.

On the surface, it is basically an investigation into another Mexican atrocity. But this is as important a book about the state of a nation as any you will find. If Hernández is right – and her evidence is formidable – for four years the government of president Enrique Peña Nieto has been openly, indeed aggressively, lying about the fate of 43 students who disappeared one evening in the town of Iguala. It has not just lied, but actively covered up a crime, using a level of brutality and torture that rivals any drug cartel. And while the newly elected president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has promised an independent inquiry, we should perhaps not hold our breath: the most disturbing part of Hernández’s message is that the years of corruption by drug cartels has left a stuttering democracy, ruled by complicit politicians, where the military operates completely according to its own rules. This resembles the Colombia of the 1990s, when the state and cartels had virtually merged.

On 26 September 2014, a group of students from a teacher-training college set out on their annual trip to Mexico City to attend a demonstration commemorating another government atrocity: the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which soldiers and police gunned down hundreds of innocent protesters. Just like every other year, these students from some of the poorest regions of Mexico set out to “commandeer” buses from local towns to get themselves there. These annual hijackings were disruptive but in the past rarely ended up in serious violence. The fallout was usually handled by local police.

In 2014, this annual rite of passage turned into a nightmare. For a couple of hours, sections of the town of Iguala turned into a battlefield, even drawing in a bus carrying a semi-professional football team on its way home from a match. Six people died, dozens were injured – and 43 students simply vanished. To a public long inured to massacres and cartel murders, it was this last outrage that struck home.

Over the next couple of months, the government, in the shape of the federal investigative authorities, established what it called the “historic truth” of the events that night. Its story was that the students had inadvertently hijacked a bus packed with heroin being smuggled by a cartel in cahoots with the local mayor, his wife and the local police. The “disappeared” students were handed over by the police to the cartel, executed and then burned in a quarry. Their ashes were disposed of in a river. The investigators, including senior figures in the president’s administration, were adamant that there was no involvement from federal agencies, all of whom have bases in the town: not the state police, nor the federal police and certainly not the army. Again and again, it was underlined that the “feds” only found out about events once the shootings were over and the students had disappeared.

Almost immediately, Hernández smelled a rat. She is one of a handful of astonishingly brave Mexican journalists who have risked their lives covering the war on drugs, in her case focusing on the role of politicians and the state. ...

She knows the gangsters in the mountains are tightly bound to the criminals in suits who live in Mexico City and are driven in smart black cars to work. The bankers; the lawyers; the politicians: the people who ensure that in Mexico you never know whose side anybody is on. Hernández lives with bodyguards. When she began this investigation she had fled the country after hooded armed men forced their way into her house. Amazingly, she returned home to write this book.

First, in an article published in December 2014, she disproved the federal authorities’ claim that they had no involvement in events. The students came from a famously radical college at which peasant children are trained to go back into their communities to teach. For years, the government and its agencies have kept a close watch on its relationship to the various guerrilla groups that make parts of south-west Mexico ungovernable. She proved that they were at least tracking all the students’ movements that day.

Then in 2016, she published this account, which dismantles the official story completely. Her chapter headings tell the story: The First Cover-up; Manufacturing Guilty Parties; The Historical Falsehood; In Mexico’s Dungeons. What emerges is a terrifying picture of how all levels of government have worked to stand up a series of lies as their “historical truth”. She provides visceral descriptions of torture to confirm a story that is reminiscent of the dirty war in the Argentinian and Chilean dictatorships of the 70s.

The government “truth” is held together by the almost tangible fear that any witnesses feel after decades of violence. More than 100 people have been arrested; many are still in prisons. But faced with Hernández’s minute analysis, the discrepancies between their forced accounts, the contradictions of lies, are laid out in pummelling detail. She names the names: the soldiers and policemen who were out on the streets when they claim they were not. When she can, she names those responsible for the torture. ...

Hernández’s version is that the students were indeed unlucky in commandeering a bus packed with heroin. But this was no local story. She claims to have interviewed a high-ranking cartel figure who, when he heard that one of his shipments had been inadvertently hijacked by the students, simply called on his contacts in the army to recover his goods. She explains how senior army officers, with the support of the police and intelligence services, set about reclaiming the goods for the cartel and how everything spun out of control. The students were unfortunate witnesses, and so had to be “disappeared”. Further collateral to the drugs war. What followed is a horrendous cover-up that reaches right to the top. Her conclusions convince. ...

There are now supporting accounts, including an international commission of inquiry, which raise many of the same questions and essentially support Hernández’s version of events, though the official media say she has no proof, and one paper called it “political fiction”. Frighteningly, at least one of her witnesses has since gone missing. The Peña Nieto administration clings to its version of the truth. Hernández’s achievement is to turn this fate of 43 disappeared students into the continuing story of a state out of control. Mexico is still a democracy, and the president-elect is genuinely offering a radical new agenda in dealing with the cartels. After reading this, though, one wonders how even the best-intentioned leader will be able to turn the tide.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/07/a-massacre-in-mexico-anabe...

Sat, 2020-03-21 10:20

lagatta4

Thanks for this. I was well aware of the massacre and its impact, but it is sometimes hard to follow the backstory.

Mon, 2020-03-23 23:33

jerrym

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.

Tomás Zerón de Lucio, was Director of the PGR Criminal Investigation Agency and Jesús Murillo Karam, former Attorney General of the Republic.

According to the journalist Álvaro Delgado of the weekly Proceso, there is new evidence that proves the active participation of members of the Army in the disappearance of the normalistas, in alleged complicity with drug traffickers. That is why the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR) has already brought criminal action against Tomás Zerón de Lucio, who was the director of the Criminal Investigation Agency that constructed the “historical truth” of then attorney Jesús Murillo Karam; as well as part of your team. Zerón de Lucio, who hypothesized that the 43 students were cremated in the Cocula garbage dump, is one of the “key actors” in the new investigation, for which the parents of the normalistas asked to proceed criminally against him, “no just for the sake of holding them accountable, but above all to break the pacts of silence, so that they collaborate in the clarification ”. ...

According to the arrest warrant issued against Zerón and his team, issued since March 10, it is for irregularities in the Ayotzinapa case such as torture, enforced disappearance, altering the crime scene, loss and concealment of evidence. Federal reports indicate that Zerón is in Canada, so Interpol has already issued a red card for its location abroad. This Wednesday, the Reforma newspaper indicates that as part of the same investigation, three officials were arrested yesterday, including Ezequiel Peña Cerda, a former command at the Criminal Investigation Agency, linked to a torture case for the disappearance of the 43 normalistas. The capture of Carlos Gómez Arrieta, former head of the Ministerial Federal Police of the former PGR, was also requested. The accusation against the former official, says Reforma, arises from the work of October 28, 2014 in the Río San Juan de Cocula, Guerrero, which was not made official in the case file.

This Wednesday, the Reforma newspaper indicates that as part of the same investigation, three officials were arrested yesterday, including Ezequiel Peña Cerda, a former command at the Criminal Investigation Agency, linked to a torture case for the disappearance of the 43 normalistas. The capture of Carlos Gómez Arrieta, former head of the Ministerial Federal Police of the former PGR, was also requested. The accusation against the former official, says Reforma, arises from the diligence of October 28, 2014 in the Río San Juan de Cocula, Guerrero, which was not made official in the case file. That day, Zerón illegally took Agustín García Reyes, “El Chereje”, one of the alleged suspects, without his lawyer and without official registration, to the area where at least one bag of human remains was allegedly found. . "In addition to not having been delivered to the agent of the federal Public Prosecutor's Office, the video recording collected during the investigation was edited and with this it was intended to prove to public opinion that the personnel of the United Nations High Commissioner participated in the proceedings "indicates a report by the General Visit Office of the FGR of June 25, 2019.

Ministerial sources explained that there are sufficient elements to suppose that Zerón and his team fabricated the so-called "Historical Truth" about the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa. On March 5, the parents of the normalistas delivered a letter to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and to the president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) Arturo Zaldívar; in which they were asked to end the pacts of silence and to act against various officials of the Enrique Peña Nieto administration, regarding the disappearance of the students. The meeting concluded with the signing of a collaboration agreement between the Executive and Judicial branches, as well as by the FGR, to clarify the Ayotzinapa case and, “in due course, make the truth known to society” of what happened that night. from the 26th and early morning of the 27th of September 2014 in Iguala.

https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2020/03/18/giraron-orden-de-apreh...

Sat, 2020-09-26 12:46

jerrym

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

Sat, 2020-09-26 12:59

jerrym

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.

Mexican authorities are preparing arrest warrants that could for the first time target soldiers in the investigation into the 2014 abduction and presumed massacre of 43 students, according to three sources briefed on the new developments.

The unsolved kidnapping of the young men who were training to be teachers convulsed the country and garnered international condemnation as one of the darkest examples of the government’s long-standing difficulty preventing violence or convicting those responsible.

In the years since the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College students in southern Guerrero state, calls to look into the potential role of army soldiers have intensified, including those stationed at a nearby base at the time of the alleged abduction.

“Arrest warrants are included for local, state and federal police in Guerrero, as well as for members (of the military) of the 27th battalion,” said one source on condition of anonymity who was not authorized to speak to the media.

Two other sources, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the inclusion of soldiers among the new warrants.

Neither the attorney-general’s office nor representatives of a national truth commission responded to requests for comment.

The defence ministry said it had no information to provide about new arrest warrants.

On Tuesday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he will provide new information on the case on the sixth anniversary of the kidnapping at the weekend, including “arrest warrants in progress.”

“What matters most is to find out where the young men are,” he said. He did not specify the targets of the arrest warrants, but noted that he will also address the charges against Tomas Zeron, a top security official in the previous administration who is wanted for tampering with evidence and torture in the case.

Last week, Lopez Obrador called on Israel, where the ex-head of criminal investigations is believed to be located, to offer him no protection from facing justice back home. The Sept. 26, 2014 kidnapping remains one of the most infamous incidents during the 13 years of Mexico’s drug war. Lopez Obrador told family members shortly after he took office nearly two years ago that there would be no impunity for anyone involved in the crime.

Investigators in July found a bone fragment belonging to one of the student teachers, which authorities said could open new leads. Before that, authorities had definitively identified the remains of just one student teacher.

Another source said the arrest warrants have met standards of proof and were signed off on by a judge. The source gave no more details. The sources did not know how many warrants would be issued or the timing.

The disappearance of the 43 students has exposed deep flaws in Mexico’s criminal justice system, and led to involvement of the Washington-based Inter-American Human Rights Commission. In 2015, the commission established the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, or IGIE, to assist the government’s investigation. The IGIE’s work documented serious flaws in a previous government investigation that concluded the students were incinerated in a dump after they were turned over to gang members by corrupt local police.

It is still not clear exactly what happened. One theory by the group of experts was that the students were killed after they mistakenly commandeered a bus carrying a cargo of heroin.

The panel’s five experts have insisted on interviewing soldiers stationed in the town at the time, but to date both the Lopez Obrador administration as well as the government led by his predecessor, former President Enrique Peña Nieto, have not made them available to interviewers. The experts have carried out similar fact-finding interviews with local, state and federal police as well as gang members suspected of involvement in the abduction or murder.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-arrest-warrants-may-be-iss...

Sat, 2020-09-26 13:02

jerrym

Here's more on who has been charged.

In the years since the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College students in southern Guerrero state, calls to look into the potential role of army soldiers have intensified, including those stationed at a nearby base at the time of the alleged abduction.

“Arrest warrants are included for local, state and federal police in Guerrero, as well as for members (of the military) of the 27th battalion,” said one source on condition of anonymity who was not authorized to speak to the media.

Two other sources, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the inclusion of soldiers among the new warrants.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-violence-ayotzinapa/mexican-so...

Tue, 2022-08-23 04:12

jerrym

Former Mexican Attorney General Jesus Morillo has been arrested on charges of forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice with regard to the murder and coverup of the 43 Mexican student teachers. The question remains whether further evidence and charges will lead to former President Enrique Peña Nieto. Arrrest papers for 83 other soldiers, police, Guerrero officials and gang members have also been released showing how extensive the entire murder conspiracy and coverup was.

Mexico’s former attorney general has been arrested in relation to the disappearance of 43 students in 2014, the most prominent individual held so far in the notorious case that has haunted the country ever since.

Jesús Murillo was arrested at his home in Mexico City home on Friday on charges of forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice in the abduction and disappearance of the student-teachers in the south-western state of Guerrero, now seen as a “state-sponsored crime”.

Murillo was taken to an office of the attorney general and would be moved to a jail in Mexico City, authorities said. Within hours of the arrest, a judge released 83 more arrest orders for soldiers, police, Guerrero officials and gang members in relation to the case, the attorney general’s office said.

During Murillo’s 2012-2015 term under then-president Enrique Peña Nieto, he oversaw the highly criticised investigation into the disappearance of the students on 26 September 2014 from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college.

The remains of only three students were ever found and identified, and questions have remained unanswered ever since.

International experts said the official inquiry was riddled with errors and abuses, including the torture of witnesses. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018 vowing to clear up what had happened.

López Obrador’s administration has tried since 2020 to arrest another top former official, Tomas Zeron, including asking Israel last year to extradite him.

When asked about the government’s move to scrutinize the past investigation, Murillo said he was pleased and was open to being questioned, local media reported in 2020.

Murillo was taken into custody wearing black slacks, his hands folded inside the pockets of a grey jacket, as a law enforcement officer with a rifle slung over his chest stood behind, an image published by local media showed.

The attorney general’s office said Murillo cooperated “without resistance”.

The arrest comes a day after Mexico’s top human rights official, Alejandro Encinas, called the disappearances a “state crime” with involvement from local, state and federal officials.

“What happened? A forced disappearance of the boys that night by government authorities and criminal groups,” Encinas told a news conference. The highest levels of Peña Nieto’s administration orchestrated a cover-up, he said, including altering crime scenes and hiding links between authorities and criminals.

Murillo took over the Ayotzinapa case in 2014 and dubbed the government’s findings the “historical truth”.

According to that version, a local drug gang mistook the students for members of a rival group, killed them, incinerated their bodies in a dump and tipped the remains into a river.

A panel of international experts picked holes in the account, and the United Nations denounced arbitrary detentions and torture during the inquiry.

The “historical truth” eventually became synonymous with the perception of corruption and impunity under Peña Nieto as anger mounted over the lack of answers.

Murillo, who had previously been a federal lawmaker and the Hidalgo state governor, resigned in 2015 as criticism mounted over his handling of the case.

The lawyer for the parents of the Ayotzinapa students, Vidulfo Rosales, urged the government to make more arrests. He told Mexican television: “There’s still a lot left to go before we can think this case has been solved.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/20/mexicos-ex-attorney-genera...

Tue, 2022-08-23 04:37

jerrym

Here's more on the arrest of the Mexican Attorney General Jesus Morillo and the case against him and his co-conspirators.

Prosecutors also announced they had issued arrest warrants in the case against 20 army soldiers and officers, five local officials, 33 local police officers and 11 state police, as well as 14 gang members. ...

Jesús Murillo Karam served as attorney general from 2012 to 2015, under then President Enrique Peña Nieto. The office of the current attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, said Murillo Karam was charged with torture, official misconduct and forced disappearance. ...

In 2020, Gertz Manero said Murillo Karam had been implicated in “orchestrating a massive media trick” and leading a “generalized cover-up” in the case. ...

The arrest came a day after a commission set up to determine what happened said the army bore at least partial responsibility in the case. It said a soldier had infiltrated the student group involved and the army didn't stop the abductions even though it knew what was happening. ...

Corrupt local police, other security forces and members of a drug gang abducted the students in the city of Iguala in Guerrero state, although the motive remains unclear eight years later. Their bodies have never been found, though fragments of burned bone have been matched to three of the students.

Murillo Karam, under pressure to quickly solve the case, announced in 2014 that the students had been killed and their bodies burned at a garbage dump by members of a drug gang. He called that hypothesis “the historic truth.”

2014:Burned bodies likely of 43 missing students in Mexico

But the investigation included instances of torture, improper arrest and mishandling of evidence that has since allowed most of the directly implicated gang members to walk free.

The incident occurred near a large army base, and independent investigations have found that members of the military were aware of what was occurring. The students’ families have long demanded that soldiers be included in the investigation.

On Thursday, the truth commission looking into the case said one of the abducted students was a soldier who had infiltrated the radical teachers' college, yet the army did not search for him even though it had real-time information that the abduction was occurring. It said the inaction violated army protocols for cases of missing soldiers.

The defense ministry has not responded to a request for comment.

The soldiers and officers being sought under Friday's warrants – and the other officials, police and gang members – face charges of murder, torture, official misconduct, criminal association and forced disappearance.

It was not immediately clear whether all the suspects faced all the charges or if the suspects were among dozens previously arrested and charged during previous investigations.

Prior to reforms in Mexican law, the army had long been allowed to refer soldiers accused of wrongdoing to separate military courts. But soldiers must now by tried in civilian courts, if their offenses involved civilians.

The soldiers being charged served at the base near where the abduction occurred in 2014.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which both Murillo Karam and Peña Nieto belonged to, wrote in its Twitter account that Murillo Karam's arrest “is more a question of politics than justice. This action does not help the victims' families get answers.”

Mexican federal prosecutors previously issued arrest warrants for members of the military and federal police as well as Tomás Zeron, who at the time of the abduction headed the federal investigation agency, Mexico’s detective agency.

Zeron is being sought on charges of torture and covering up forced disappearances. He fled to Israel, and Mexico has asked the Israeli government for help in his arrest.

Gertz Manero said that in addition to Zeron’s alleged crimes connected to the case, he is alleged to have stolen more than $44 million from the Attorney General’s Office budget.

The motive for the students’ abduction remains a subject of debate.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/08/20/mexico-attorney-gen...

Tue, 2022-08-23 18:11

#10

kropotkin1951

I hope the President and all the prosecutors have good protection.