Still No Progress for Families Seeking Justice in Missing Ayotzinapa Students Case Francisco Goldman - The New York Times
go to original March 1, 2017

Families of 43 missing college students protesting the lack of progress in the case in Mexico City on Sunday (Mario Guzman/European Pressphoto Agency)

A few weeks ago, much was made of reports of a telephone call made by President Trump to his Mexican counterpart, Enrique Peña Nieto,during which he reportedly said that if Mexican troops were too fearful of the country’s “bad hombres” to confront them, he would dispatch United States troops to take care of the job.

The problem with Mexico’s approach to fighting violence isn’t one of fear — that Mexican authorities are afraid of organized crime — but of complicity, as the unsolved case of the September 2014 disappearance of 43 students at a teachers college in Ayotzinapa, in the Pacific state of Guerrero, distressingly illustrates.

Evidence gathered by an international team of five legal experts formed by the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which spent 14 months in Mexico monitoring the government’s investigation, found evidence of various degrees of complicity in the crime, from lowly municipal policemen accused of having abducted the students up through federal and military authorities to powerful government officials. That kind of problem, which provides cover to organized crime, demands legal and political solutions, including cross-border cooperation, not military actions.

On Feb. 9, the federal prosecutor’s office, announced the final results of an internal review of its handling of the Ayotzinapa case. An earlier review, never accepted by the attorney general, had concluded that the investigation was flawed and had even broken laws. The new report exculpated the prosecutor’s office, and defended left its original theory of the crime, which was strongly rebutted by other investigators. When the report was presented to the relatives of the missing students, they denounced it as part of a cover-up.

The “disappearing” of the students shocked Mexico and much of the world. Earlier, the Peña Nieto administration took steps to mitigate criticism at home and from abroad over its inept handling of the case by allowing that international team, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, to investigate. Now it seems that the government doesn’t care about international criticism of its new hard line, or maybe it anticipates that there isn’t going to be much.

Could one reason be that Mr. Trump’s belligerent threats have suddenly cast the Peña Nieto government in the role of victim, making it an object of sympathy? Though Mr. Peña Nieto’s approval ratings had plummeted to 12 percent, Mexicans, their national pride outraged, have encouraged the government to defy the American president. Maybe governments and international organizations that before might have wanted to speak out against Mexican corruption and official complicity in crimes against citizens now feel constrained to mute such criticism, so as not to add fuel to Trumpian vitriol.

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: UN Reports Violations on Ayotzinapa Investigation in Mexico (Prensa Latina)

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