How Mexico's attack on human rights undercut an international investigation
How Mexico's attack on human rights undercut an international investigation
Pushback goes beyond the Ayotzinapa case of missing students with reports of widespread torture and group accusing government of ‘smear campaign’
David Agren in Mexico City
@el_reportero
Wednesday 6 April 2016 13.48 EDT
With little fanfare, Mexican officials have quietly tried to undercut an international investigation into one of the country’s worst human rights tragedies: the attack on 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school, who were kidnapped and presumably killed by police and whose bodies have never been found.
At a press conference on Friday, an investigator working on a third inquiry into the case repeated the government’s claim that the students’ bodies were burned at a rubbish dump – even though two previous investigations by international experts have rejected the theory.
Forensic scientists from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IACHR) and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental organisation, have both ruled out the government’s version of the events: weather records show it rained on the night of the students’ disappearance, while satellite images show there were no fires at the site on the night.
But the Mexican government seems intent on maintaining its theory – described by the former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam as the “historical truth” – in an effort to close down a case that has caused international embarrassment and sent President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval rating plummeting.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/mexico-human-rights-ayotzinapa-missing-students-iachr
