Parents and relatives hold the portraits of students who went missing during the year December 24, 2014 in Iguala, Mexico. ALFREDO ESTRELLA / AFP
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. This decision comes a day after the publication of a report by an official commission, which classified the case as a “state crime”.
Former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam was arrested Friday night at his home in Mexico City for “enforced disappearance, torture and crimes against the administration of justice” and offered no resistance, prosecutors said in a press release.
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Prosecutors later announced that arrest warrants had been issued for 20 army personnel and 44 police officers for their alleged involvement in the case, shocking Mexico. These 64 police officers and soldiers are wanted for “organized crime, enforced disappearance, torture, manslaughter and offenses against the administration of justice”, the public prosecutor specified. The identity and rank of the wanted persons were not mentioned.
Prosecutors have also issued arrest warrants for fourteen members of the Guerreros Unidos drug trafficking cartel.
The most important person arrested so far
Mr. Murillo Karam, who served under President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), is a former heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 uninterrupted years until 2000. He is the most important figure arrested so far as part of this investigation, which started from scratch after left-wing President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador took power in 2019.
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On the night of September 26-27, 2014, a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Teachers College in the southern state of Guerrero traveled to the nearby city of Iguala to “requisition” buses to go to Mexico City to attend a demonstration.
According to the investigation, 43 young people were arrested by local police in collusion with the Guerreros Unidos drug trafficking cartel, then shot dead and burned in a landfill for unknown reasons. Only the remains of three of them could be identified.
On Thursday, an official report released by the Ayotzinapa Truth Commission, appointed by Mr. Lopez Obrador, estimated that Mexican soldiers bore partial responsibility for the crimes.
“Their actions, omissions or participation led to the disappearance and execution of the students, as well as the murder of six others,” Interior Ministry Secretary of State Alejandro Encinas said during the report’s public presentation.
“state crime”
“An institutional action was not accredited, but there were clear responsibilities of elements” of the armed forces, he added, without specifying whether these “elements” were still active. Mr. Encinas has repeatedly called the Ayotzinapa case a “state crime”.
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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 Mr. Murillo Karam, whose conclusions were rejected by the victims’ families and independent experts, held the military unaccountable. This version accused a cartel of drug dealers of killing the students, mistaking them for members of a rival gang.
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“Bringing this cruel and inhumane situation to the public while punishing those responsible will help prevent these unfortunate events from happening again” and “strengthen the institutions,” Mr. Lopez Obrador said on Friday. The Mexican president has also indicated that he will continue to press Israel to extradite the former chief of the Attorney General’s Office of Criminal Investigation, Tomas Zeron. This former high-ranking official, who was accused of involvement in the Ayotzinapa affair but has maintained his innocence, fled to Israel, where he sought asylum.