Investigators, denied access in student disappearances, will leave Mexico
“They’ve lied to us, they’ve responded with falsehoods. We have no more information,” said Carlos Beristain, a member of the panel of legal and medical experts named by the Inter-American Commission On Human Rights to investigate the 2014 disappearance. “We can’t investigate like this.”
The team’s departure raises concerns that a case that has transfixed the nation will never be solved. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised when he took office in 2018 to find answers and get justice for the victims and their families. But only three of the students’ remains have been identified and no one has been convicted of a crime in relation to the disappearances.
“I’m devastated,” Cristina Bautista, the mother of one of the missing students, wrote in a text message. “How are we supposed to get to the truth if the experts leave?”
The presumed massacre of the 43 students from the college in the village of Ayotzinapa shocked a country that had largely grown inured to violence. Investigators have alleged that the government of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto staged an elaborate coverup of a crime that involved both a drug gang and security forces at the local, state and federal levels.
The Mexican military has consistently denied it was involved in the disappearances.
López Obrador, Peña Nieto’s successor, created a Truth Commission to solve the crime — his first act upon taking office.
In the five years since, however, the president has increasingly relied on the military to tackle Mexico’s extreme violence, expanding its budget and responsibilities while brushing aside many allegations of abuses, including the use of powerful spyware against those seeking justice in the Ayotzinapa case.
In recent weeks, authorities have arrested 10 members of the army in connection with the disappearances. López Obrador said they would not have impunity. But he indicated that the men might have been rogue actors, emphasizing that the army was a “fundamental institution for the state, and it acts very well.”
Human rights activists said the imminent departure of the expert panel underscored the limits to investigating the military.
“President López Obrador made a commitment to Ayotzinapa when he was first elected,” said Tyler Mattiace, who monitors Mexico for Human Rights Watch. “But when push came to shove and he had to choose between pursuing truth and justice for Ayotzinapa or protecting the military, he chose to protect the military.”
On the night in 2014 when the students vanished, they commandeered several buses in the southern city of Iguala to travel to a protest of a student massacre by Mexico’s armed forces in 1968.
But before they could leave the city, investigators have said, they were attacked by local police allegedly working with a drug cartel that was using passenger buses to traffic heroin to the United States.
Several students were wounded, three were killed, and 43 others were taken away by the police.
The disappearances ignited nationwide protests. Peña Nieto’s government concluded an investigation by blaming local police and the cartel, which it said killed the students and burned their remains in a trash dump.
That investigation drew intense criticism, and Mexico agreed to receive technical assistance from an Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts named by the Inter-American Commission. These investigators found gaping holes in the government’s version of events. They documented torture of detained suspects and found evidence that security forces were aware of the attack on the students as it happened but did nothing to stop it.
The independent investigators said they were smeared in the media during Peña Nieto’s term and targeted with powerful spyware. “Instead of seeing us as allies in the search for truth, we were seen as someone to neutralize,” they wrote in their report Tuesday.
The investigators left Mexico in 2016. In 2020, López Obrador’s government invited them back.
For a time, it appeared as if progress was finally being made.
In March 2022, the independent panel reported that the military had been monitoring the students and patrolling in Iguala on the night of the attacks, including in places where the students were abducted.
In August, López Obrador’s Truth Commission issued a report calling the disappearances a “crime of state.” The commission’s leader, Alejandro Encinas, accused a now-retired army general of having ordered six of the students killed. (The officer denied the allegation.) A former attorney general was arrested in connection with the case. A special prosecutor obtained warrants for 83 suspects, including the retired army general.
That’s when things began to unravel.
The attorney general’s office requested the cancellation of nearly two dozen of those arrest warrants, including 16 of the 20 issued for members of the military. The special prosecutor resigned and fled the country.
In April, the New York Times revealed that lawyers for families of the 43 students had been targeted with sophisticated spyware, most likely by the military, as recently as 2022. Encinas, a longtime ally of López Obrador’s, also was surveilled, a revelation first reported by the Times. The president denied his government conducted illegal spying.
“It raises real questions about the extent to which the military is under civilian control,” said Mattiace, of Human Rights Watch.
In a previous report, the independent panel accused high-level members of the military of colluding with drug traffickers and the Defense Ministry of obstructing its investigation.
Over eight years, the investigators have interviewed dozens of witnesses and survivors of the attacks, combed through military archives and visited prisons to secure testimony.
For their latest report, they obtained cellphone tower records indicating that the military and federal police were at key points in Iguala at the time the students were being attacked.
But without the full cooperation of the armed forces, the commission members said, they could go only so far.
“The evidence shows that different authorities know what happened, or have important evidence that has not been shared,” they wrote in their final report. “It is a demonstration of impunity.”
And the students? “The story of what took place remains in the darkest shadows.”
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