01 Nov , 2022 By : Kaushiki Mehta
MEXICO CITY — A group of international experts investigating the 2014 disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico warned Monday that an attempt by the government to accelerate the results has created a “crisis” for the investigation and risks diminishing confidence in the outcome.
At a crucial stage, the special prosecutor who has led the government’s investigation since 2019 resigned in September over apparent interference by the attorney general and the government replaced him with someone unfamiliar with the case. A government Truth Commission report in August muddied the waters by presenting questionable screen captures of message exchanges as evidence, according to the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts.
The group was created by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
to investigate the abduction and forced disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the state of Guerrero.
“To lose the existing capacity (of the experienced prosecutor and others working with him) in such a decisive moment is a serious risk for the case and will have negative consequences,” the experts said in their statement.
On Sept. 26, 2014, local police took the students off buses they had commandeered in Iguala, Guerrero. The motive for the police action remains unclear eight years later, but investigators believe drug trafficking was at least partially involved.
The students’ bodies have never been found, though fragments of burned bone have been matched to three of the students.
The experts group said that a forensic analysis of screen captures of messages allegedly sent between people participating in the abduction and disappearance of the students could not be confirmed as authentic and displayed a number of inconsistencies.
However, even without those messages, the experts insisted that there was still evidence that a number of members of the military were following the events of that night closely yet did not intervene to save the students — or even one of their own, who had infiltrated the school noted for left-wing activism.
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