The Mexican judiciary on Friday, August 19 ordered the arrest of the country’s former attorney general and 64 police officers and soldiers over the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa (South) Normal School, which was made public the next day Report by an official commission qualifying this case as a “state crime”.
On Friday evening, former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam was arrested at his home in Mexico City on charges of “enforced disappearance, torture and offenses against the administration of justice” and offered no resistance, prosecutors said in a press release.
Prosecutors later announced that arrest warrants had been issued for 20 army officers and 44 police officers and five civil servants for their alleged involvement in the case, causing deep shock in Mexico and abroad. All are wanted for “organized crime, enforced disappearance, torture, manslaughter and offenses against the administration of justice”.
On the night of September 26-27, 2014, a group of students from the teacher training school in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, traveled to the nearby city of Iguala to request buses for a demonstration in Mexico City.
According to the investigation, 43 young people were arrested by the local police in collaboration with the criminal group Guerreros Unidos, then shot and burned in a landfill for reasons that are still unclear. Only the remains of three of them could be identified.
On Thursday, an official report released by the Ayotzinapa Truth Commission set up by Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador estimated that the Mexican military was complicit in the crime.
“An institutional action was not accredited, but there were clear responsibilities of elements” of the armed forces, said Undersecretary of Interior Alejandro Encinas during the public presentation of the report, without specifying whether these “elements” were still in operation. He repeatedly described the Ayotzinapa case as a “state crime”.
Another commission, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), created under an agreement between the Peña Nieto government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleges that soldiers falsified evidence found at the dump where the bodies were burned.
The first official investigation, led by former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam, found the military to be unaccountable, the conclusions of which were rejected by the victims’ families and independent experts. This version accused a cartel of drug dealers of killing the students, mistaking them for members of a rival gang.