Internal Report Says Mexico Investigators Broke Law in Search for 43 Ayotzinapa Students Paulina Villegas and Elisabeth Malkin - The New York Times
go to original December 16, 2016

More than two years after 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa in Mexico, their loved ones still seek justice and closure. (Field of Vision)

Update: Mexico Defends Decision Not to Release Report on 43 Missing Students from Iguala (UPI)

The Mexican government has refused to release an internal review that found investigators broke the law in their search for 43 missing students, a conclusion that threatens the legal foundations of a case that has roiled Mexico.

The report found that crucial suspects were arrested and moved illegally, throwing into question any evidence they provided. The investigators’ conduct, in the words of the government report, violated “the right to truth” and damaged the victims’ right to justice.

The students’ disappearance from the southern city of Iguala in September 2014 remains an open wound in Mexico, evidence of the country’s failure to protect its citizens and impunity within a corrupt criminal justice system.

The report provides the first evidence from inside the attorney general’s office showing how the case was mishandled.

The internal review was completed four months ago, 177 pages printed out and ready for delivery to the students’ parents. The families arrived expectantly for a meeting with the attorney general on Aug. 18, bearing posters of their missing sons.

But the inspector general of the attorney general’s office told them his superiors needed to approve the report first, which he said was a simple formality. That approval never came. Instead, the report is still under study, according to the attorney general’s office, which gave no indication when it would be finished, if ever.

The inspector general who prepared the review, César Alejandro Chávez Flores, abruptly resigned four weeks after that meeting.

A copy of the report obtained by The New York Times suggests why it remains in bureaucratic limbo. It depicts a series of violations, including the government’s top investigator’s taking a suspect to identify the supposed crime scene without a defense lawyer present.

A record of that visit was never placed in the case file and the site was left unguarded overnight.

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: Mexico-Ayotzinapa, the Army and the Drug War: Deplorable Cover Up (Mexico Voices)

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