AI: Mexico missing students’ investigation inconclusive

Amnesty International said Thursday that the investigation into the forced disappearance of dozens of students in southern Mexico four months ago is inconclusive and urged authorities to pursue every line of investigation and ensure that “no stone is left unturned.”

The Londonbased rights organization said after meeting with relatives of the victims that Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo “has failed to properly investigate all lines of inquiry into allegations of complicity by armed forces and others in authority in the enforced disappearance” of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a teacher’s college, on Sept. 26 in Iguala, a city in Guerrero state.

“Amidst worries about the possible complicity of local government authorities and the army, it is all the more important that every line of investigation is thoroughly explored and that no stone is left unturned,” AI’s Americas director, Erika Guevara, said.

Mexico’s government has said families of the missing students can search army bases for their loved ones, although it has categorically rejected accusations that federal forces were involved in the violence.

AI has “a catalog of concerns over the way the investigation has been run and whether the full range of these crimes, including enforced disappearance and the killing of six people when the students were first attacked have been fully addressed,” Guevara said.

The rights watchdog’s latest call for action comes a day after Austrian forensic scientists said they had been unable to identify remains that are believed could be those of the missing students and will use a different technique that could take three months to complete.

To date, the bodies of only one of the 43 students has been identified. Scientists at Austria’s Innsbruck University made that identification by analyzing remains found at the rural dump in Cocula, a town near Iguala where members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel said they killed the young people and incinerated the bodies.

The case “has highlighted Mexico’s appalling human rights record,” AI said, noting that “more than 100,000 people have been killed in Mexico since the ‘war on drugs’ began in 2006 (under former President Felipe Calderon) and at least 23,000 are missing, according to official data.”

Mexican authorities say corrupt municipal cops handed over the students to drugcartel enforcers who killed the young people and then incinerated them at a nearby dump.

The federal government’s account also places blame for the massacre on ousted Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, who allegedly have ties to the Guerreros Unidos gang and are in custody.

Authorities say the couple ordered police to prevent the teacher trainees from disrupting a political speech to be given by Pineda on the night the students disappeared.

But families of the students remain unwilling to accept the federal government’s version of events and are demanding to know why soldiers of the Igualabased 27th Infantry Battalion who witnessed the police attack on Sept. 26 did not intervene.

Respected newsweekly Proceso published last month a story drawing on a confidential Guerrero state government document that points to Mexico’s Federal Police as the perpetrators of the slaughter of the 43 students.