Witness Confirms Cover-Up of Mexico Army Slayings After Drug Gang Members Surrendered Mark Stevenson - The Associated Press
go to original December 31, 2014

In this Dec. 23, 2014 photo, a woman who spoke on the condition of anonymity in fear retribution by officials and drug traffickers looks through court documents during an interview in her home in Mexico. (AP/Christian Palma)

ARCELIA, Mexico — When the witness refused to sign a false statement that 22 suspected drug gang members had died in a shootout with the Mexican army, state investigators began to kick her in the ribs, she said. They put a bag over her head, plunged her face into a toilet bowl and beat her so hard that, six months later, she still has trouble with her hearing and eyesight.

"As they were hitting me ... they told me they could make even the mute talk," said the woman, one of three witnesses known to have survived a June 30 mass killing by the Mexican army.

In her first interview since being falsely imprisoned for five months on weapons possession charges, the woman said a cover-up of the crime went far beyond the seven soldiers facing trial in the case to include more soldiers, and state and federal prosecutors who pushed to make the deaths look like the result of a gunbattle rather than what they were - extra-judicial killings after surrender.

Criminal case files obtained by The Associated Press last week supported her assertion that state prosecutors knew from the start that soldiers had altered the crime scene, despite official and public declarations to the contrary. And the documents revealed that the battalion commander responsible for the troops arrived at the scene before state investigators.

The witness, a 20-year-old prostitute who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that two days after the beating in the state of Mexico she was taken to the capital, where she was pressed into signing the false statement by federal organized crime investigators working for the attorney general's office.

Read the rest at The Associated Press

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