Executed and burnt: five years of the crime of Ayotzinapa
mexican authorities have launched in a landfill in Tepecoacuilco a new operating group search for 43 students who disappeared on the night of 26th of September 2014 in the municipality of Iguala, in Guerrero State. In a new attempt to give with tracks that help to find the young missing five years ago, the Prosecutor’s office and the Army have begun this operation with heavy equipment to remove soil and waste in the landfill of the municipality of Tepecoacuilco, located 15 kilometers southeast of Iguala.
The operation has been carried out in collaboration with members of the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice, a group created in December by the mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to re-investigate this complex case. The dump of Tepecoacuilco is currently protected by the mexican Army, and is located just a 10-minute drive from Iguala, where the disappearance of 43 young people who were studying to be a teacher in a school located in the town of Ayotzinapa, also in the State of Guerrero.
According to the official version of the Prosecutor’s office of the former president, Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the 43 students were arrested in Iguala by a group of corrupt police officers who handed them over cartel local Warriors United. This organized group allegedly killed and burned in the dustbin of Cocula, located about 20 kilometers to the southwest of Iguala.
This theory is based on the testimony of more than a hundred people. However, the justice mexican has released in the last few weeks to 77 of the 142 people arrested for the “Ayotzinapa”. These releases are due to a multitude of irregularities committed by the public Prosecutor’s office against the suspects, including torture or evidence inconsistent with the research.
One of the released has been Gildardo López Astudillo , aka “The Gil”, one of the main accused by the Prosecution of participating in the disappearance of the students. Supposedly, The ‘Gil’ was the nexus between the local police with the cartel Warriors United, for allegedly transporting the young to the dump of Cocula, where they were executed and burned, according to the “official” version defended by the office of the Prosecutor Peña Nieto.
On the eve of the fifth anniversary, the office of the Prosecutor now under the command of López Obrador has announced that it will introduce legal remedies for alleged irregularities committed by the then attorney Jesus Murillo Karam, and two officials who had direct involvement in research: Tomás Zerón and Jose Aaron Perez Cart.
The Truth Commission will investigate the case
With the goal of demonstrating that Mexico is experiencing a new stage under its mandate, the president, Lopez Obrador has become the search for the missing, one of the priorities of his administration. As well, the president has launched a search plan for the 40,000 people reported missing across the country. However, various organizations estimate that there could be more than 300,000 people missing, given that many families do not report the crime for fear of reprisals by criminal organisations.
Within these crimes, ‘Ayotzinapa’ is the case of greatest importance for the government because that is the one that has enjoyed the greatest international relevance, since the official version, he emphasized the close collaboration that exists between local governments and criminal organizations. Therefore, the first measure that took Lopez Obrador as president was to create the Truth Commission that will investigate the case, a committee composed of various experts and some of the relatives of the 43 missing.
The importance of this case is such that Luis Raúl González Pérez, the president of the National Commission of Human Rights, has recently indicated that the mexican government does not have budget restrictions to finance the whole operation needed to discover what happened to the students who disappeared five years ago. Between 2007 and 2016, it is estimated that in Mexico we have found a total of 1075 mass graves with 2.204 bodies, according to a study of the Ibero-american University and the Commission of Defense and Promotion of Human Rights.