Mexican forces knew 43 student teachers who disappeared in 2014 were kidnapped by criminals and then hid evidence that may have helped find them, according to a special investigation report released Monday.
A former Colombian prosecutor, Angela Buitrago, said the group of independent experts found evidence that authorities withheld or falsified evidence from the beginning of the search.
“It was fabricated from day one to the last,” said Buitrago, who is part of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights group assisting the investigation.
Buitrago said investigators, prosecutors and military personnel altered crime scenes and records. A government drone video provided to the experts showed marines and police officers scrambling around the area where the students were said to have been killed with little control.
The students of a radical faculty were kidnapped, allegedly killed and burned by local police in the southern state of Guerrero.
But the students were being monitored because their college, which has strong ties to left-wing social movements in Mexico, was viewed as a hotbed of subversion, experts said.
“Security agencies had two intelligence investigations underway, one to trace organized crime activities in the area and the other to track down the students,” investigators said in the report, which was based on declassified documents.
After the kidnapping, investigators attempted to quickly solve the crime by illegally searching, arresting and torturing suspects.
Mexico has asked the Israeli government for the extradition of a former senior security official, Tomás Zerón, who was the head of federal investigations at the time of the kidnapping. He is wanted for torture and covering up enforced disappearances.
Zerón, who fled to Israel in August 2019, led the Attorney General’s Office’s criminal investigation and forensic work in the 2014 case. Most of the students’ bodies were never found, although burned bone fragments have been attributed to three students.
The investigation has long been criticized by the families of the 43 students who disappeared in September 2014 after being arrested by local police in Iguala, Guerrero. They were allegedly handed over to a drug gang and murdered, and have not been heard from since.
Zerón was at the center of the government’s much-criticized investigation, which failed to definitively determine what happened to the students. Two independent teams of experts have challenged Mexican officials’ claims that the students’ bodies were incinerated in a major fire at a garbage dump.
Many of the suspects arrested in the case were later released, and many said they were tortured by police or the military.