Fire Expert Refuted Government Claim That 43 Disappeared Students Were Incinerated at Infamous Dump
Washington, DC, January 28, 2022 – National Security Archive continues the "After Ayotzinapa" project by publishing today the José Torero Cullen interview.
“After Ayotzinapa” is the result of a two-year collaboration between the National Security Archive and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Reported and co-produced by National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle and Reveal senior reporter Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, the three-part serial reveals the story of what happened in the months and years following the forced disappearance of 43 college students in the state of Guerrero, Mexico on September 26, 2014. Part One: The Missing 43, aired on January 15. It describes the actual attack on the students. Part Two: Cover-Up, aired on January 22. It details the botched initial investigation and exposure of government obstruction. Part Three: All Souls, airing on January 29, addresses the efforts being made by a new government to overcome the cover-up and truly advance the cause of truth and justice for the missing 43 students. There are three ways to listen: on your podcast app of choice: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher; on Reveal’s website, and on radio stations around the United States.
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The interview
José arrived in Mexico City from Australia, where right away he was confronted by “a level of stress and tension among all the people involved” that he had never faced before.
I was brought immediately to see some evidence by the lawyers, to meet the Argentinian forensic team who had photographs and information of all the work that they had been doing for a long period of time. And the next morning, we go directly to La Procuraduría General de la República (PGR–Mexico’s justice department) and we get put in a helicopter. It's such an unusual context for somebody like me who basically works on technical matters. We arrive in Guerrero, we jump into armored cars, people are carrying weapons, and you're being driven into this dump.
I'm an academic. My regular day is: I go to work, I interact with students, I teach classes, I do my research. I do the occasional investigation that forces me to go to the field. But taking a car to a senior government office, going to the roof, catching a helicopter, flying in a helicopter and then landing in a soccer field surrounded by military cars and people with automatic weapons, and being literally escorted into a car... I mean, that's more James Bond film than the type of environment in which someone like me is used to working.
We asked José: Can you describe the dump and what you found there that contributed to your conclusions?
You have to descend maybe 150, 200 yards down into this hole, and the path that you're descending is incredibly steep, but also it’s not a path of soil, it is a path of garbage. So you have enormous amounts of garbage, plastic bottles, bags, you name it - insects all over the place, your legs are being eaten alive - and you have to walk through this garbage until you get to the bottom. [...] The whole bottom part of the dump had already been cleared, it had already been studied, a number of people had already collected a massive amount of evidence. [But] that's not really what I went to see.
If you're thinking about incinerating a very large number of bodies, what you're going to be needing is a very large fire. Now, a very large fire radiates an enormous amount of heat. And that enormous amount of heat, for example, when in proximity of plastic bottles will melt those plastic bottles and shrivel them and most likely actually ignite them. So you would have had significant evidence of fire-spread on the slope. So the slope would have been filled with burnt material. [...] What I did was a mapping of radiation. And I basically showed that as you moved away from the place where the fire was meant to be, you would have expected ignition of this garbage. You would have expected charring of the trees. You would have expected melting. So in principle, that slope would have had massive amounts of damage.
Now, instead, if you correlate the images that were taken days after the apparent incineration of these bodies, you will see that the same bottles - I managed to identify the same bottles that were in images taken months before - were still there! And they were completely undamaged. They were completely unaltered, and it was exactly the same pieces of garbage that could be identified. So the slope was, one, not altered, and two, had not been affected by radiation. So the unavoidable conclusion is that there could have not been a big fire in that dump.
More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/mexico/2022-01-28/fire-expert-refuted-government-claim-43-disappeared-students-were
