Why Mexico Still Doesn't Know What Happened to Missing Ayotzinapa Students Rebecca McCray - TakePart
go to original September 12, 2015

Relatives and friends of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students holding signs that read, "They were taken alive." (Omar Torres/Getty Images)

Listen: NPR's Audie Cornish speaks to Andrew Selee of the Woodrow Wilson Center about a new report that contradicts the Mexican government's official narrative on how 43 students were killed last year. (NPR.org)

Nearly a year after 43 college students were kidnapped in the Mexican state of Guerrero, a critical new report from independent human rights researchers discredited the government’s response to their devastating disappearance, further damaging public perception about the government’s ability to effectively handle national crises and stop the bloody fallout of the country’s drug war.

Four months after the students were kidnapped while traveling by bus to the city of Iguala, Mexican officials declared them dead, with the country’s attorney general saying they were murdered by a drug gang and local police before being incinerated in a garbage dump. No bodies were found, and few were convinced by the announcement. Dismayed, mourning parents and students took to the streets to protest the government’s failure to swiftly investigate the disappearances and the lack of justice served. Now, their concerns are backed up by a report released this week by experts at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which questions the government’s conclusion that the students’ bodies were incinerated and challenges the accuracy of the government’s investigation. The commission is an independent watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C., that monitors human rights in the Americas.

“The government not only proved unable to solve the problems, but its instinct seemed to be to shunt them aside, give pro forma explanations, and launch flawed investigations,” Michael Shifter, president of Washington-based policy forum Inter-American Dialogue, told The New York Times. “It greatly underestimated how frustrated and angry many Mexicans would become.”

The new report theorizes that the most plausible explanation for the mysterious attack on the students’ buses was that they were unwittingly carrying heroin or drug money - though this too remains unproven. Above all, the report calls for further, independent investigation, and it fuels growing doubts about the Mexican government.

Read the rest at TakePart

Related: Student Survivor, Relatives and Over 87,000 Signing Change.org Petition Demand "No More Lies" (Mexico Voices)

Related: Iguala: A New Investigation, the Same Doubts (Mexico News Daily)

Related: Could Mexican Officials Eventually Face Charges for Failings in Missing Students Case? (VICE News)

Related: Independent Expert Explains How Mexico Botched Investigation of 43 Missing Students (The Huffington Post)

Related: UN Experts Welcome Report on Disappeared, Executed and Tortured Students in Mexico (UN News Centre)

Related: Report on Missing Students Reverberates Through Mexico (The New York Times)

Related: Ayotzinapa: 10 Reasons to Keep the Search for Truth Alive (The World Post)

Related: Ayotzinapa, Mexico: International Fire Expert Explains His Finding That Students Could Not Have Been Burned in Cocula Dump (Mexico Voices)

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