The Mexican judiciary on Friday, August 19, 2022 ordered the arrest of the country’s former attorney general and 64 police and military officers over the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa (South) Normal School in 2014, the day after a report was published official commission dealing with this case a “state crime”.
Also read: The investigation into the disappearance of 43 Mexican students is published
Ex-Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam was arrested at his home in Mexico City on Friday evening “Enforced disappearances, torture and crimes against the administration of justice”, and offered no resistance, prosecutors said.
20 soldiers, 44 police officers and 14 drug dealers arrested
Prosecutors later announced that arrest warrants had been issued for 20 army personnel and 44 police officers for their alleged involvement in the case, causing deep shock in Mexico and abroad.
These 64 police and military officers are wanted “Organized crime, enforced disappearances, torture, homicides and crimes against the administration of justice”, said the prosecutor. The identity and rank of those wanted were not given.
Jesus Murillo Karam, who served under President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) and led a controversial initial investigation into these disappearances, is a former heavyweight of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive years until 2000.
This is the most important figure so far to have been arrested as part of this investigation, which was started from scratch after leftist President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador took power in 2019.
Prosecutors have also issued arrest warrants for 14 members of the Guerreros Unidos drug trafficking cartel.
Only the remains of three identified students
On the night of September 26-27, 2014, a group of students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school in the southern state of Guerrero traveled to the nearby town of Iguala “request” Driving buses to Mexico City for a demonstration.
According to the investigation, 43 young people were arrested by the local police in collusion with Guerreros Unidos, then shot and burned in a landfill for unknown reasons. Only the remains of three of them could be identified.
An official report published on Thursday by the Ayotzinapa Truth Commission set up by Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador concluded that Mexican soldiers were partly responsible for the crime.
“Your actions, omissions or complicity made possible the disappearance and execution of the students and the murder of six others,” Interior Secretary Alejandro Encinas said during the public presentation of the report.
Military falsification of evidence?
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 Jesus Murillo Karam, held the military 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.
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