Mexican justice ordered, Friday August 19, the arrest of the former attorney general of the country as well as 64 police and soldiers for the disappearance in 2014 of 43 students from the normal school of Ayotzinapa (south), the next day. the publication of a report by an official commission which called this case a “state crime”.
On Friday evening, ex-Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam was arrested at his home in Mexico City for “enforced disappearance, torture and offenses against the administration of justice”, and did not put up any resistance, the prosecution said in a statement.
The prosecution later announced that arrest warrants had been issued against 20 army officials and 44 police officers and five civil servants for their alleged involvement in the case, which caused deep shock in Mexico and abroad. All are wanted “organized crime, enforced disappearance, torture, homicide and offenses against the administration of justice”.
On the night of 26 to 27 September 2014, a group of students from the teacher training school in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, traveled to the nearby town of Iguala to requisition buses in order to go to Mexico City for a demonstration.
According to the investigation, 43 young people were arrested by local police in collusion with Guerreros Unidos, then shot and burned in a landfill for reasons that remain unclear. Only the remains of three of them could be identified.
On Thursday, an official report published by the Ayotzinapa Truth Commission set up by the President of Mexico, Manuel Lopez Obrador, estimated that the Mexican military had a share of responsibility in this crime.
“An institutional action was not accredited, but there were clear responsibilities of elements” of the Armed Forces, Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said during the public presentation of the report, without specifying whether these “elements” were still active. He repeatedly called the Ayotzinapa case a “state crime”.
Another commission, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), which was created under an agreement between the Peña Nieto government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), maintains that soldiers falsified evidence found in the dump where the bodies were burned.
The first official investigation, led by the former attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam and whose conclusions were rejected by the families of the victims and by independent experts, did not attribute any responsibility to the military. This version accused a cartel of drug traffickers of having had the students killed by taking them for members of a rival gang.