For millions of people in Mexico and around the world, they have become something of a martyr and a symbol of the horrors that a state can wreak when it collaborates with criminal organizations. For others, they were victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, in a country that is like a minefield and where one wrong step is fatal. There is even a radical minority who have wanted to portray them as troublemakers who paid with their lives for the mistake of getting involved where they shouldn’t (and who were politically exploited after their disappearance). What is certain is that the 43 students of the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa kidnapped on September 26, 2014 in the municipality of Iguala, Guerrero, represent a social wound that is still open and represents one of the greatest fractures in the Mexican culture and institutional power in recent decades.
In the almost eight years that have passed since the events, all possible versions of what happened have been revealed, including the famous “historical truth” defended by then-prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam (arrested last Friday, on charges because of violent disappearance and torture) and passed by the entire federal government until the change of color in the administration in 2018. This version, in short, suggested that the youths, who forcibly took transport trucks to take them to a protest, were murdered and their bodies burned by the criminal group Guerreros Unidos, with the assistance of bribed city police officers. The criminals mistook them for members of Los Rojos, a rival organization. This position was never accepted by the students’ parents and was also questioned by the reports of the Independent Group of International Experts (GIEI), which investigated the case for almost two years.
After attaining the presidency in 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government overturned the previous investigation and formed a truth commission of the Ayotzinapa case, taking the approach that the students’ disappearance was an episode that additionally required the criminal will of Guerreros Unidos , broad institutional participation that includes military commanders and federal, state, and local police and law enforcement agencies at all levels. Of course, not only to make young people disappear, but also to change crime scenes, falsify information and hide data. Federal prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 46 former officials linked to the matter, including those responsible for the original investigation, Tomás Zerón, who evaded justice and is currently in Israel. As if that weren’t enough, at least 26 people relevant to the investigation died during its development, the commission adds. So the case of Ayotzinapa is the incarnation of defilement.
Murillo Karam’s arrest has sparked controversy. The opposition, pointing out that this is more than a measure of justice, is a media maneuver that will eventually fade, recalling the arrests of former officers Rosario Robles (free since last week) and Emilio Lozoya ( who have enjoyed months of freedom and whose allegations against the previous government have not yet achieved anything concrete). What the new investigation reconciles with the discarded one is the fact that there is no way these young people from marginalized and popular communities were kidnapped and massacred against their will and whose tragic fate continues to overshadow the country.
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