43 Missing Students, 1 Missing Mayor: Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico

[Coyote]

Mexican president gonna get tough on crime...

Mexican Leader Announces Nationwide Crime Crackdown
November 27, 2014 ~ Mexico's president announced a nationwide anti-crime plan Thursday that would give Congress the power to dissolve local governments infiltrated by drug gangs and give state authorities control over often-corrupt municipal police.

As if to underscore the crime problem, Mexican authorities Thursday reported the discovery of 11 mutilated bodies in the violence-racked state of Guerrero, with a note left at the scene tying the massacre to a criminal group. The victims were reported to be men in their 20s who were shot, partially burned or beheaded before being dumped on a highway in the area of Chilapa. That discovery was made as the country marked the disappearance two months ago of 43 students at a teachers college in the Guerrero city of Iguala. They were reportedly killed and incinerated by a drug gang working with local police. "Mexico cannot go on like this," President Enrique Pena Nieto said in announcing his initiative.

His plan would relax the complex manner in which offenses are dealt with at federal, state and local levels. At present, some local police refuse to act to prevent federal crimes like drug trafficking. It would also seek to establish a national identity number or document, though it was unclear what form that would take. The plan would focus first on four of Mexico's most troubled states — Guerrero, Michoacan, Jalisco and Tamaulipas — sending more federal police and other forces to the "hot land" area of the first two states, where the government has already sent significant contingents of federal police and soldiers.

Demonstrator covers face with poster reading "Pena Out" during protest in support of 43 missing students outside office of Mexico's Attorney General, Mexico City

Other main proposals include:

— Constitutional reform to establish unified state police forces, going from more than 1,800 weak municipal police forces to 32 forces in the country's 31 states and the capital.

— Establishment of a single national emergency phone number, preferably "911."

— Expeditious passage of anti-corruption legislation pending in Congress.

— Emphasis on a reform agenda in the next session of Congress on civil justice and human rights, including reform of torture laws and investigations into disappeared persons.

Gang-related violence and the government's crackdown on cartels have left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead or missing since 2006.

Mexican Leader Announces Nationwide Crime Crackdown

Do you think he really will?

 

[rightwinger]

Are they gettin' fed up an' not gonna take it any more?...

Mexico's missing students: Will case prove a tipping point?
November 6, 2014 ~ The disappearance of 43 college students in September has reverberated deeply in Mexico, bringing together disparate protest movements and raising hopes that leaders will finally have to address the ongoing corruption and impunity it exposes.

The number 43 is cropping up across Mexico City these days: Written large on banners near Revolution Plaza and scribbled small on posters advertising office space for rent. In a public park, one wall bears the graffiti message: “It hurts 43 times.” The signs all refer to the mass kidnapping in September of 43 students from a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero. It is not the biggest or bloodiest crime in Mexico’s recent history, but it has struck a national nerve. It has exposed alleged connections between local officials, police, and organized crime. And many here hope it can be a turning point for Mexico, which has struggled to address the corruption and impunity that grip the nation, even as President Enrique Peña Nieto tries to highlight its economic promise.

Since he took office, the international conversation about Mexico has changed markedly. From the start, Mr. Peña Nieto rallied politicians from rival parties to join a “Pact for Mexico,” enabling passage of landmark reforms including energy, education, and telecommunications. Homicides have fallen by 29 percent since 2012 according to government statistics, and after six years of headlines focused on beheadings and mass graves, suddenly the international media were heralding “Mexico’s Moment” for development and economic growth.

But the students’ abduction in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City, after a run-in with local police has drawn back the curtain once again, exposing the continuing grip of corruption and insecurity. Politicians have started talking about the need for a renewed “Pact for Mexico” that focuses on security, and protests have taken place nationally over the past month. The demonstrations are bigger, broader-based, and more enduring than Mexico has seen in recent years, says Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

There’s almost a sense of hope that this could lead to a real shift, says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who chairs the government department at the University of Texas Brownsville and focuses on organized crime. “Could it actually be that this is Mexico’s moment?”

'The hope of Latin America'

We didn't get fed up and not gunna take it no more when we had 20 first graders murdered

Why should Mexico be any different. Like us, they will shrug their shoulders and say.......that's the way it is

 

[ChrisL]

Are they gettin' fed up an' not gonna take it any more?...

Mexico's missing students: Will case prove a tipping point?
November 6, 2014 ~ The disappearance of 43 college students in September has reverberated deeply in Mexico, bringing together disparate protest movements and raising hopes that leaders will finally have to address the ongoing corruption and impunity it exposes.

The number 43 is cropping up across Mexico City these days: Written large on banners near Revolution Plaza and scribbled small on posters advertising office space for rent. In a public park, one wall bears the graffiti message: “It hurts 43 times.” The signs all refer to the mass kidnapping in September of 43 students from a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero. It is not the biggest or bloodiest crime in Mexico’s recent history, but it has struck a national nerve. It has exposed alleged connections between local officials, police, and organized crime. And many here hope it can be a turning point for Mexico, which has struggled to address the corruption and impunity that grip the nation, even as President Enrique Peña Nieto tries to highlight its economic promise.

Since he took office, the international conversation about Mexico has changed markedly. From the start, Mr. Peña Nieto rallied politicians from rival parties to join a “Pact for Mexico,” enabling passage of landmark reforms including energy, education, and telecommunications. Homicides have fallen by 29 percent since 2012 according to government statistics, and after six years of headlines focused on beheadings and mass graves, suddenly the international media were heralding “Mexico’s Moment” for development and economic growth.

But the students’ abduction in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City, after a run-in with local police has drawn back the curtain once again, exposing the continuing grip of corruption and insecurity. Politicians have started talking about the need for a renewed “Pact for Mexico” that focuses on security, and protests have taken place nationally over the past month. The demonstrations are bigger, broader-based, and more enduring than Mexico has seen in recent years, says Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

There’s almost a sense of hope that this could lead to a real shift, says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who chairs the government department at the University of Texas Brownsville and focuses on organized crime. “Could it actually be that this is Mexico’s moment?”

'The hope of Latin America'

We didn't get fed up and not gunna take it no more when we had 20 first graders murdered

Why should Mexico be any different. Like us, they will shrug their shoulders and say.......that's the way it is

That is retarded. We are NOTHING like Mexico, fool! Mass shootings make up less than 0.1% of ALL crime in the US, genius.

 

[waltky]

'Other disappeared' leave gaping holes in Mexican families...

'Other disappeared' leave gaping holes in Mexico's fabric
16 Sept.`15 — On the morning of her high school graduation, Berenice Navarijo Segura was delayed for a hair and makeup appointment by an explosion of gunfire in the center of town. Her mother was up before dawn preparing stewed goat and beans for the celebration, and didn't want her to risk going out. Her sister, who had made enough salsa for 60 guests, tried to hold back the spirited 19-year-old with questions: "Do you have your wallet? What about your phone?"

But there was a reason the family called Berenice "Princess." She'd already paid the salon and was determined to look her best for the big day. Accustomed to dodging gun battles in a region overrun by drug cartels, she waited for only 20 minutes after the shooting subsided before rushing out the door with a promise to be quick. She hopped onto the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle and vanished into the ranks of Mexico's missing.

Snapshots with brief descriptions of missing people are tacked to a board in the San Gerardo Catholic Parish in Iguala, Mexico. Little attention had been paid to the many people who have disappeared or been kidnapped in this region until 43 students from a rural teachers college disappeared in Iguala, Sept. 26, 2014. Two months after the students disappeared, hundreds of families began coming forward to tell their stories, emboldened by the international attention focused on the missing students.

Sixteen other people, including Berenice's boyfriend, disappeared from Cocula on that day, July 1, 2013 — more than a year before 43 students from a teachers college were detained by police in nearby Iguala and never seen again. For all those months, most of the Cocula families kept quiet, hoping their silence might bring children and spouses home alive, fearing that a complaint might condemn them to death. "What if I report it and my daughter is nearby and they know I reported it, they hurt her or something?" reasoned Berenice's mother, Rosa Segura Giral.

Relatives of Victor Albarran Varela look at a photo of him, at his home in Cocula, Mexico. He is among the 25,000 Mexicans who have disappeared since 2007, according to the government’s count. Victor was 15 years old when he was taken on July 1, 2013.

Then the disappearance of the students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa became an international outrage. The government rushed to investigate the crime and announced with great fanfare its official conclusion that the youths had been killed and the ashes of their incinerated bodies dumped in Cocula. Emboldened by the sudden attention to abductions, the families of Cocula began coming forward, and hundreds of other families from the state of Guerrero emerged from silent anguish. They spoke of their misfortune to each other, often for the first time, and signed lists, adding the names of their loved ones to the government's growing registry of 25,000 people reported missing nationwide since 2007. They swabbed the inside of their cheeks for DNA samples. And they grabbed metal rods to poke in the craggy countryside for traces of the family members whom they started calling "the other disappeared."

In this May 12, 2015 photo, relatives of missing people gather under a tree at the San Gerardo Catholic Parish, in Iguala, Mexico. Little attention had been paid to the many people who have disappeared or been kidnapped in this region until 43 students from a rural teachers' college disappeared in this city on Sept. 26, 2014.

Sometimes they found evidence of bodies, and sometimes the authorities dug up graves from anonymous fields. More than 100 bodies have been pulled from the soil. But like the students of Ayotzinapa, all but one of whom are unaccounted for, so far the remains of only six of the other disappeared from around Iguala have been identified and given back to their families. The others are still missing. And their families are the other victims.

MORE

 

[waltky]

After all this time and only 2 out of 43 identified???...

Mexico Identifies Possible Second Victim of Student Kidnapping
September 16, 2015 - Mexican authorities say they have identified the remains of a second person missing after last year's kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students in the country's southern Guerrero state.

Mexico's Attorney General Arely Gomez said Wednesday that experts from Austria's Innsbruck Medical University found indications of a possible match between some of the remains and a student named Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, who was 21 when he disappeared September 26, 2014. Last December experts identified a bone fragment as belonging to 19-year-old Alexander Mora. The remains were among bone fragments that were found at a landfill where Mexican prosecutors say the bodies of the students may have been dumped and incinerated.

But earlier this month, international experts reviewing the Mexican government's probe of the abductions rejected the government's official narrative. They accused investigators of mishandling evidence and relying solely on statements from suspects. A more than 400-page analysis was released September 6 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -- the autonomous rights arm of the Organization of American States – said there is no evidence supporting the government's central claim.

A masked protester poses with a sign reading "We are missing 43.

The government's theory says the students were captured by local police and turned over to drug cartel assassins after commandeering buses for transportation to a protest. Under that theory -- first presented late last year by Mexico's former attorney general -- the bodies of the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College were dumped at a trash site and incinerated outside a nearby town.

But the independent report said the dump fire was not strong enough to burn the victims to ashes, and it said investigators from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain based that finding on expert analysis. Human rights activists and parents of the students continue to voice outrage that the investigation has been based on the testimony of more than 100 people arrested on suspicion of involvement in the disappearances. The detainees include the former mayor of the town of Iguala.

Mexico Identifies Possible Second Victim of Student Kidnapping

 

[Coyote]

Ya, it's abyssmal - just two!

 

[emilynghiem]

Pretty unbelievable - this isn't some far off over seas country - this is right next door. And we complain about corruption?

43 students murdered and interred in mass graves.

Elected officials working in collussion with drug gangs and cartels to facilitate this mass murder.

Unbelievable. The poor families

43 Missing Students 1 Missing Mayor Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico Parallels NPR

On the second story of the municipal palace in Iguala, Mexico, Mayor Jose Luis Abarca occupied the large corner office. His wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, head of the city's family welfare department, occupied the one right next door. From there, residents say, the two ruthlessly ruled over this city of 150,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. A national newspaper dubbed the duo the "imperial couple."

But on Sept. 30, their reign ended. The mayor, with his wife by his side, asked the city council for a leave of absence. Neither has been seen since.

That happened four days after 43 university students disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala. Twenty-eight bodies — thought to be some of the missing students — were discovered in a nearby mass grave a week ago. More mass graves were discovered Friday.

The case highlights the corruption and collusion between politicians and drug traffickers in many parts of rural Mexico today.

Residents say Iguala changed under the current Mayor Abarca's tenure.

"Crime has been terrible since Jose Luis Abarca took over," says Claudia Guitierrez, a 20-year-old law student. "Iguala was never like this before."

These days Mexico's new paramilitary gendarmerie patrols Iguala's streets. Twenty-two local cops are under arrest, four are fugitives, and the remainder of the force was relieved of duty.

Authorities say that on Sept. 26, officers shot at three buses of students from a poor, rural teaching college who had come into town soliciting donations. After the shooting, with six people dead, the local cops were seen corralling the surviving students into patrol cars. Reportedly some of the officers confessed to turning the students over to a local drug gang, which later killed them.

Authorities say they don't have a motive yet, but focus has centered on Iguala's mayor and his wife, who have well-known connections to traffickers.

A friend of mine was trying to explain to me what the border was like.
He said even if you paid police to let you transport illegal cargo over the border,
they'd take your money, then seize your loot anyway.

He said it was like the Wild Wild West, where anything goes.
And big families with old money who own land in the Rio Grande Valley area
can do whatever they want and get away with it. Complete lawlessness where money is the only motivation.

 

[waltky]

Body recovered but corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments...

In search for Mexico's 43, 1 brutal killing goes ignored
Sep 25,`15 -- Unlike the families of the 43 students who disappeared a year ago, Julio Cesar Mondragon's loved ones were left with a body to bury. But there is little comfort in that, because Mondragon's corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments.

His autopsy showed several skull fractures, internal bleeding and other injuries consistent with torture. His face had been flayed, a tactic often used by the drug cartels to incite terror. Photos of his bloody skull were uploaded to the Internet. International attention has been focused on the 43 students who vanished a year ago Saturday, but six others died at the hands of police in those hours, including Mondragon, a 22-year-old father of a girl who is now 1 year old. According to an independent group of experts, the disappearances and the killings were the result of a long, coordinated attack against students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa who had come to the southern city of Iguala to commandeer buses for a protest.

But the events of last Sept. 26 were far from isolated. Some 25,000 people have been reported missing in Mexico since 2007, and hundreds from the Iguala area in the last year alone. The disappearance of the students has drawn attention to others who have been lost, as well as brutal drug cartels, official corruption, government indifference and languishing legal cases. According to Mexico's former attorney general, the 43 disappeared in an attack by police and the Guerreros Unidos drug gang because they were mistaken for rival gang members. The attorney general said last November they were killed and burned to ash in a giant pyre in the nearby Cocula garbage dump. The independent experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took apart that version earlier this month, saying authorities knew who the students were from the minute they headed for Iguala, and at the very least did nothing to stop the attacks.

Afrodita Mondragon, mother of slain student Julio Cesar Mondragon, covers her face in grief as she speaks inside her home in San Miguel Tecomatlan, a rural town in the hills of Mexico state. Unlike the families of the 43 students who disappeared a year ago, Julio's loved ones were left with a body to bury. But there is little comfort in that, because his corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments. His autopsy showed several skull fractures and other injuries and internal bleeding to his body consistent with torture. His face had been flayed, a tactic often used by the drug cartels to incite terror and send a message.

They say the funeral pyre simply didn't happen, and suggest the attack occurred because students unknowingly hijacked a bus carrying illegal drugs or money. Iguala is known as a transit hub for heroin going to the United States. Families say the judicial neglect extends to Mondragon and five others killed that night. His fellow students Daniel Solis and Julio Cesar Ramirez, were shot dead at close range. Driver Victor Manuel Lugo Ortiz and David Jose Garcia Evangelista, 15, died when police fired at a soccer team bus. Blanca Montiel, 40, was killed by stray gunfire while riding in a taxi. Mondragon had been on one of the buses when it was attacked, then later showed up at a press conference the students called at 12:30 a.m. amid the mayhem. He fled when police opened fire. Witnesses said shortly after they last saw him, they heard screams from someone they assumed had been detained. About 6 a.m., soldiers found his body less than a mile (kilometer) from where he disappeared.

Though Mondragon's autopsy points to torture, that doesn't appear in the court records. A report by a military unit at the scene said his face had been peeled off with a knife. But the autopsy says it could have been done by an animal after the body was dumped. His family calls that conclusion "a mockery." Mondragon's case could provide clues to who was behind the attack, according to the commission. But it languishes in three separate court files. Mondragon's body will be exhumed for a new autopsy. The former mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, is among 28 people charged with his killing. Authorities say he was the one who ordered the attacks. But Sayuri Herrera, lawyer for the Mondragon family, said it would be easy for any defense attorney to get the charges thrown out because the shabby investigative work and foggy charges filed by prosecutors could weaken the case. Charges have already been dropped against one police officer, who remains jailed for the missing 43. "There's not even clarity in the accusations," said Herrera.

MORE

 

[waltky]

How can a land of such colorful people also be the home of such violence??...

Mexican leader vows truth in student case
Sat, Sep 26, 2015 - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Thursday pledged to pursue the truth in the case of 43 students who disappeared last year, as frustrated families accused authorities of lying about what happened.

Pena Nieto spoke for almost three hours with parents of those missing in a Mexico City museum ahead of today’s first anniversary of a tragedy bedeviling his administration. The mothers and fathers, who were almost halfway into a 43-hour fast in honor of their sons, presented eight demands to Pena Nieto in a document charging that the authorities had manufactured a “historic lie.” Mexican presidential spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said Pena Nieto signed the document and ordered the Mexican Attorney General’s Office, as well as the interior and foreign ministries, to analyze it. “We are on the same side and we are working on the same goal: To know what happened to your sons and punish each and every one of those who are responsible. We are searching for the truth together,” Pena Nieto told the parents at the closed-door meeting, Sanchez said. “The president made it very clear that the investigation remains open, it was never closed, it will not be shelved,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said Pena Nieto ordered the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate the thousands of disappearances in the country, though the spokesman did not explain how it differed from a similar unit created in 2013. “It’s cosmetic,” security expert Alejandro Hope said. “It all depends on whether there is political will and how much resources they invest into this announcement.” The parents asked that the unit be placed under international supervision, but Sanchez said it was up to the foreign ministry to look into it. Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer for the parents, said the president had not yet “committed to fulfilling any” of the demands and that the promises made by Pena Nieto were not new. Rosales said the parents were “treated in a violent manner” by presidential security after the gathering, a charge that Sanchez denied.

Students of Ayotzinapa teachers college hold portraits of the 43 missing students during a march from the school to Chilpancingo, Mexico

After the meeting, only the second since the students went missing, the parents returned to the capital’s historic Zocalo square, where they had set up camp on Wednesday. “We won’t rest, we will be a pebble in his shoes. We won’t go home,” said one mother, Maria de Jesus Tlatempa. The attorney general’s office has come under criticism from the parents and human rights groups, which have accused it of prematurely declaring that the students were all slaughtered.

The students, from a rural teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared after they were attacked by local police in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26, last year. Prosecutors say police then delivered the young men to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which killed them and incinerated their bodies after confusing them with rivals. The official investigation was questioned earlier this month by independent experts who said they doubted the students were burned in a funeral pyre at a garbage dump.

Mexican leader vows truth in student case - Taipei Times

See also:

Mexican President Peña Nieto puts special prosecutor on missing students case
Sept. 25, 2015 - His decision came as the families prepare to mark the one-year anniversary of the disappearance.

Mexico will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the 2014 disappearance of 43 students, President Enrique Peña Nieto told the missing students' families. He spoke to the families in a private session Thursday in Mexico City. The families have expressed concern that the year-old investigation is flawed. They seek an international panel of experts to examine the incident and want the possible role of the army to be examined.

They also believe an initial report was meant to mislead them. A public prosecutor's report concluded the students were illegally detained by corrupt police officers in Mexico's Guerreros state, handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel and then killed, their bodies burned in a garbage dump. A six-month independent review by analysts, sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an agency of the Organization of American States, found errors in the report.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, here in the White House in January 2015, will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the 2014 disappearance of 43 students.

The meeting of Peña Nieto and the skeptical families resulted in nothing new, said Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer representing the families. "What guarantee do we have that this new investigation won't be more theater? We're not going to give up; we're going to continue searching," Vidulfo said in Mexico City's central plaza, surrounded by family members.

Peña Nieto, in a social media message after the meeting, assured the families "we are on the same side and we want the same thing, to know what happened to each of their children." A public 43-hour hunger strike was begun Wednesday by about 50 family members to note the one-year anniversary of the disappearance. A commemorative march through Mexico City was scheduled for Saturday.

Mexican President Peña Nieto puts special prosecutor on missing students case

 

[waltky]

Students' disappearance has become a `cause celebre' in Mexico...

Mexicans march on anniversary of 43 students' disappearance
26 Sept.`15 — Thousands of people marked the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students by marching down Mexico City's premier avenue in an atmosphere of defiant hope Saturday.

Activists said the movement might bring justice for Mexico's disappeared, though only two of the students' remains have been identified by DNA analysis of charred bone fragments. While the march was smaller than past demonstrations, the case has helped publicize the thousands who have gone missing since Mexico's drug war started in 2006. Peace and anti-crime activist Maria Guadalupe Vicencio wore a skirt made of a Mexican flag splattered with fake blood. The names of three disappeared activists from her violence-plagued home state of Tamaulipas were written across her shirt. Vicencio said the students' movement "sets an example for all Mexicans to wake up, and not be silent."

People march along Paseo de la Reforma on the one year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 college students from Guerrero state, in Mexico City, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015. One year ago, several students and bystanders were killed and 43 students vanished in the city of Iguala, allegedly taken by police and then handed over to a criminal gang who burned their bodies in a garbage dump, according to a federal investigation. Families of the missing and independent investigators cast doubts on the official version.

In a meeting with the parents of the 43 missing students earlier this week, President Enrique Pena Nieto promised to create a special prosecutors' office to investigate all of Mexico's disappearances. More than 25,000 people disappeared in Mexico between 2007 and July 31, 2015, according to the government. Unidentified bodies often turn up in clandestine graves of the kind used by drug gangs to dispose of victims. But most people disappear without a trace. The 43 students from a radical teachers college disappeared on Sept. 26, 2014, after a clash with police in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero. Six other people were killed at the hands of the police during the disturbances. According to Mexico's former attorney general, local police illegally detained the students and then turned them over to the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos, which then allegedly killed them and incinerated their remains.

Relatives of the 43 missing college students hold images of their loved ones during a march marking the one year anniversary of their disappearance in Mexico City, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015. A year ago, several students and bystanders were killed and 43 students vanished in the city of Iguala, allegedly taken by police and then handed over to a criminal gang who burned their bodies in a garbage dump, according to a federal investigation.

A group of independent experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took apart that version earlier this month, saying the funeral pyre simply couldn't have happened at the small area of a garbage dump where prosecutors say it did. "For me, the parents of the students have taught us a lesson, about keeping hope for change alive," said Carlos Martel, a business executive who attended Saturday's march with his wife. The parents of the missing students — many of them barely literate farmers — marched silently at the head of the demonstration. They have refused to accept the government's version that their sons are dead and have called for a new investigation under international supervision. They stoically decline to concede that the chance their sons will be found grows ever more remote.

A woman holds up a sign with the number 43 and the name of a missing student as thousands prepare to mark the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 rural college students from Guerrero state with a march in Mexico City

And they refuse to give up. "If they are betting on us getting tired, they're wrong," said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, the father of a missing student.While the government has agreed to re-evaluate the funeral pyre theory, the parents' movement is at a crossroads. Students and relatives of the missing young men blocked traffic on the main highway from Mexico City to the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco on Saturday, but authorities are increasingly less willing to tolerate such disruptions. Many other Mexican social movements based on outrage, like the 2011 crime victims' caravans, have later lost steam. "You have to protest," said university professor Francisco de la Isla, who attended the demonstration with his two young sons. "But it's not enough just to hold marches. You can hold two or three marches, but with five, people get tired." "It's clear you need a political movement," de la Isla said.

Mexicans march on anniversary of 43 students' disappearance

 

[waltky]

Parents of missing students won't celebrate Mexico's Day of the Dead...

Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate
Sat, Oct 31, 2015 - As millions of Mexicans set up altars to the dead and buy orange cempasuchil flowers to adorn their Day of the Dead offerings of food and drink, the parents of 43 college students who disappeared last year are refusing to accept the Mexican government’s finding that their children are dead.

There will be no Day of the Dead altar for Mauricio Ortega, who was 18 when he and the other students were taken away by police in the southern city of Iguala on Sept. 26 last year. According to government prosecutors, the students were turned over to a drug gang who killed them and incinerated their remains. Charred bone fragments have provided a match to only two of the students. Mauricio’s father, Meliton Ortega, shakes his head when asked if the family will set up an altar to his son. “No, for us, our sons are alive,” Ortega said. “It’s not the way the government says, that we should just accept our grief.”

Parents of the missing students have come up with other ways to mark their sons’ disappearances. At the radical rural teachers’ college attended by the young men, known as Ayotzinapa, plastic chairs with their names and photos are arranged in rows, a stark reminder of those who used to sit there. Their possessions have been left largely untouched, as if awaiting their return. After more than 13 months since their disappearance, that seems unlikely. And some, like former Mexican president Vicente Fox, have said the parents “cannot live eternally with this problem in their heads ... they have to accept the reality.”

Clemente Rodriguez, the father of missing student Christian Alfonso Rodriguez, said those who tell the families that their children are dead “are people who do not have a heart” or who work for the government. A report by an independent panel of experts concluded the students’ remains could not have been incinerated at a garbage dump as prosecutors argue. Parents insist their sons are alive and, with little proof, assert that the young men are being held at military bases.

Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate - Taipei Times

 

[emilynghiem]

Parents of missing students won't celebrate Mexico's Day of the Dead...

Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate
Sat, Oct 31, 2015 - As millions of Mexicans set up altars to the dead and buy orange cempasuchil flowers to adorn their Day of the Dead offerings of food and drink, the parents of 43 college students who disappeared last year are refusing to accept the Mexican government’s finding that their children are dead.

There will be no Day of the Dead altar for Mauricio Ortega, who was 18 when he and the other students were taken away by police in the southern city of Iguala on Sept. 26 last year. According to government prosecutors, the students were turned over to a drug gang who killed them and incinerated their remains. Charred bone fragments have provided a match to only two of the students. Mauricio’s father, Meliton Ortega, shakes his head when asked if the family will set up an altar to his son. “No, for us, our sons are alive,” Ortega said. “It’s not the way the government says, that we should just accept our grief.”

Parents of the missing students have come up with other ways to mark their sons’ disappearances. At the radical rural teachers’ college attended by the young men, known as Ayotzinapa, plastic chairs with their names and photos are arranged in rows, a stark reminder of those who used to sit there. Their possessions have been left largely untouched, as if awaiting their return. After more than 13 months since their disappearance, that seems unlikely. And some, like former Mexican president Vicente Fox, have said the parents “cannot live eternally with this problem in their heads ... they have to accept the reality.”

Clemente Rodriguez, the father of missing student Christian Alfonso Rodriguez, said those who tell the families that their children are dead “are people who do not have a heart” or who work for the government. A report by an independent panel of experts concluded the students’ remains could not have been incinerated at a garbage dump as prosecutors argue. Parents insist their sons are alive and, with little proof, assert that the young men are being held at military bases.

Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate - Taipei Times

This is so very sad. I understand they found some remains, but not enough to provide real answers and closure the families need.
I feel very similarly at a loss for the families in Asia still searching for answers with their loved ones lost at sea in the unresolved plane crashes.

Whatever they are feeling it is beyond what I or anyone can understand unless we've gone through it. I think when that degree of unbearable suffering goes "off the scale"
people have no way to gauge how to respond, and so they don't even try,
for lack of ability to even cope with the immense and unfathomable loss.

I don't think we mean to be cruel by not addressing these wrongs.
I think our definition of justice is so limited, if something breaks all the rules, and defies all reason.
we just don't know where to begin, so we end up doing nothing. And go focus on something
that we do have a socially established way of responding to that we can make sense of.

 

[waltky]

Cartel killer tells his tale of murder...

30 lives extinguished, but no regrets: A killer's story
15 Dec.`15 — The killer says he "disappeared" a man for the first time at age 20. Nine years later, he says, he has eliminated 30 people — maybe three in error.

He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets, he says, because he is providing a kind of public service, defending his community from outsiders. Things would be much worse if rivals took over. "A lot of times your neighborhood, your town, your city is being invaded by people who you think are going to hurt your family, your society," he says. "Well, then you have to act, because the government isn't going to come help you."

He operates along the Costa Grande of Guerrero, the southwestern state that is home to glitzy Acapulco as well as to rich farmland used to cultivate heroin poppies and marijuana. Large swaths of the state are controlled or contested by violent drug cartels that traffic in opium paste for the U.S. market, and more than 1,000 people have been reported missing in Guerrero since 2007— far fewer than the actual number believed to have disappeared in the state.

A man claiming to be responsible for kidnapping, torture and killing on behalf of a drug cartel speaks to the Associated Press in Guerrero state's Costa Grande region, Mexico. The 29-year-old raises cattle for a living and doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker or a professional killer, although he is paid for disappearing people. While he acknowledges that what he does is illegal, he says he is defending his people against the violence of other cartels.​

The plight of the missing and their families burst into public awareness last year when 43 rural college students were detained by police and disappeared from the Guerrero city of Iguala, setting off national protests. Then, suddenly, hundreds more families from the area came forward to report their kidnap victims, known now as "the other disappeared." They told stories of children and spouses abducted from home at gunpoint, or who left the house one day and simply vanished.

This is a story from the other side, the tale of a man who kidnaps, tortures and kills for a drug cartel. His story is the mirror image of those recounted by survivors and victims' families, and seems to confirm their worst fears: Many, if not most, of the disappeared likely are never coming home. "Have you disappeared people?" he is asked. "Yes," he replies.

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Iguala tries to get past student disappearances...

After student disappearances, Mexico city tries to turn page
Dec 21,`15 -- The previous elected mayor is in jail, and the new one wants to "turn the page" on the ugliest chapter in the history of this southern Mexican city.

Fifteen months ago, when 43 rural college students disappeared at the hands of local police and cartel thugs, Iguala became the symbol of Mexico's narco-brutality. Now, federal police are in charge of security, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party controls city hall - and Mayor Esteban Albarran Mendoza wants to move forward. "Ask the businesspeople, ask the cab drivers, the housewives, those who live daily here in the city, what they are enduring right now ...," Albarran said. "There is anxiety. There is not peace. There is not security. We want to turn the page on all these kinds of things." But how can this city move on when, according to a local newspaper's count, there were five murders during Albarran's first week in office, and 25 in his first two months?

Disappearances continue, and most of the missing have not been found. For hundreds of families around Iguala there is no possibility of turning the page as long as they have no proof of death or a body to mourn. On Tuesdays, they gather in the San Gerardo church basement to listen to the new numbers from the attorney general's office: bodies found, bodies identified, bodies returned to their families. Most leave without answers and return home to await a call to view photos of clothing or evidence of a genetic match. While seeking resolution of old horrors, there are new ones.

Children play in a recently inaugurated fountain with colored lights, surrounded by posters of the 43 missing students outside City Hall in Iguala, Mexico. Fifteen months ago, when 43 rural college students disappeared at the hands of local police and cartel thugs, Iguala became the symbol of Mexico’s narco-brutality. Now, federal police are in charge of security, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party controls city hall _ and Mayor Esteban Albarran Mendoza wants to move forward.​

Zenaida Candia Espinobarro already spent her Sundays with other families searching the mountains around Iguala for hidden graves, looking for the remains of a son who disappeared two years ago. But while she was looking for the bones of one son, she lost another: Armando Velazquez Candia was shot by two men on a motorcycle in front of his girlfriend's house the afternoon of Oct. 26 and died 10 days later. Along with the bloodshed, the drug trade goes on. Despite the presence of federal and state police, and the military, there is no sign that trafficking has abated around Iguala or elsewhere in Guerrero state - a producer of marijuana and opium paste for the U.S. heroin market.

Again this month, state and federal officials promised to secure Guerrero and eradicate more poppy fields, recognizing that efforts of the past year had little impact. Not that Iguala is unchanged. Former Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca Velazquez was arrested and charged with murder in connection with the disappearance of the 43 students, and 66 police from Iguala and neighboring Cocula have been jailed. Authorities have disbanded the local police force that allegedly turned the students over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which officials say was closely allied with Abarca.

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[waltky]

Mum's the word...

Experts say obstacles blocking probe of missing students
Feb 21,`16 -- International experts for the Inter-American Human Rights Commission said Sunday that they have run into serious obstacles in their investigation into the case of 43 college students who went missing after being detained by police in southern Mexico in 2014.

Members of the panel said at a news conference that they were concerned about being given limited access to new information uncovered by government investigators and they criticized leaks of statements from some of those arrested in the case that the panel said "don't correspond to the truth." They also said authorities had not allowed them be present for statements by military personnel who were witnesses of the disappearance or been given access to videos that could clarify what happened that night.

Later Sunday, the federal Attorney General's Office issued a statement reaffirming its willingness to work with the expert panel and saying it already is investigating the leaks. It denied that officials have fragmented findings from the government's investigation, which it said remains open. In their first report in September, the expert panel rejected the official version of the government that after being killed, the students' bodies were incinerated at a dump. The panel charged at that time that some Mexican authorities had obstructed justice in the case.

The students from a local teachers college have not been seen since Sept. 26, 2014, when they were detained after clashing with municipal police in the city of Iguala in Guerrero state. Six other people were killed during the clashes, including some not involved in the confrontation. Government prosecutors have said the police turned the students over to a local drug gang, which killed them and burned their bodies.

News from The Associated Press

 

[waltky]

17 incinerated remains found in southern Mexican dump...

Outside experts say at least 17 burned at Mexican dump
Apr 1,`16 -- Experts have found evidence of a large fire in which at least 17 bodies were burned at a dump in southern Mexico, a member of the investigating team said Friday, in the latest twist in the case of 43 missing teachers' college students.

Ricardo Damian Torres, speaking from the offices of Mexico's attorney general, said tests would be conducted in the coming weeks to determine whether it would have been possible to burn all 43 at the dump in the town of Cocula in Guerrero state, where the government has said the students' bodies ended up after disappearing in nearby Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014. Relatives of the missing students have fiercely disputed the government's version of events and multiple previous investigations by other teams of experts concluded they could not have all been burned at the Cocula dump. The government's perceived mishandling of the symbolic human rights case has dogged the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto.

In Friday's brief press conference, Torres did not say when such a fire occurred or offer any explanation as to how the team conducted its research and reached its conclusion. "There is sufficient evidence, including physically observable, to affirm that there was a controlled fire event of great dimensions in the place called the Cocula dump," he said, speaking for the six-member fire-expert team and sitting beside Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos. He took no questions. In an interview with Milenio TV, Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer representing the families, said they had not reviewed the experts' report and could not discuss it. However, he expressed concern about the way the attorney general's office was handling the investigation.

Relatives of the 43 missing students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college march holding pictures of their missing loved ones during a protest in Mexico City. A third investigation of a dump site in southern Mexico found evidence indicating there was a large fire there in which at least 17 people were burned, a member of a six-person fire expert team said Friday​

It was the latest in a series of investigations into what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa. They disappeared after hijacking buses in Iguala. Evidence indicates they were intercepted by local police and turned over to members of a local drug cartel. Four months after they disappeared, Mexico's then-attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam laid out the results of the government's investigation with such certainty that he called it the "historic truth." Citing confessions and forensic evidence, he said all 43 students were dead and had been incinerated at a garbage dump outside Cocula. Murrillo Karam said their incinerated remains were then thrown into a nearby river. Genetic testing of remains the government said it recovered from the river eventually confirmed the identities of two of the missing students. In terms of motive, he said the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which controlled the area, had believed some of the students were from a rival gang.

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Bodies burned beyond recognition...

Experts question report on missing Mexican students
Mon, Apr 04, 2016 - Argentine forensic experts who have studied a dump in southern Mexico where Mexican government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing students were burned on Saturday said that results from a new investigation of the site are incomplete and inconclusive.

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team released a statement saying that the latest investigation by a team of experts “neither confirms nor denies” the official version of what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa. The team were called in shortly after the teachers’ college students disappeared in Iguala in Guerrero State on Sept. 26, 2014. An investigation by the Mexican government concluded that they were killed by a local drug gang after being confused with members of a rival group. They were purportedly taken by corrupt local police and handed over to the gang, which incinerated their bodies at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula and threw the remains into a river.

The team studied the dump and said first in January last year and later in a full report released in February that the evidence did not support the official version of events. In September last year, another team of independent experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report that dismantled the government’s investigation. The report said police and the military were monitoring the students, but no one intervened when they were attacked.

On Friday, a representative of the new team said it had found evidence of a large fire at the Cocula dump. Team member Ricardo Damian Torres said the remains of at least 17 burned bodies were found in the dump, but he did not specify when the bodies were incinerated. “There is sufficient evidence, including physically observable, to affirm that there was a controlled fire event of great dimensions in the place called the Cocula dump,” he said, speaking for the six-member fire-expert team.

Experts question report on missing Mexican students - Taipei Times

 

[waltky]

Granny says, Dat's right - sometimes ya gotta get the guilty to talk...

Report: Mexican police tortured suspects in students' case
Apr 24,`16 ) -- There is strong evidence that Mexican police tortured some of the key suspects arrested in the disappearance of 43 students, according to a report released Sunday by an outside group of experts.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expert group says that a study of 17 of the approximately 123 suspects arrested in the case showed signs of beatings, including, in some cases, dozens of bruises, cuts and scrapes. One suspect said he was nearly asphyxiated with a plastic bag, and medical studies showed another had been slapped on the ears so hard his eardrums broke and his ears bled. The Mexican government recently released documents suggesting investigations had been opened against police and military personnel, but authorities have not answered requests about whether anyone has been arrested or charged.

The 43 students at the radical teachers' college of Ayotzinapa have not been heard from since they were taken by local police in September 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state. Family members and supporters of the missing students chanted "They took them away alive, we want them back alive!" at the news conference where the report was presented. No high-ranking officials attended the presentation of the report, which called the government's investigation flawed and incomplete. But President Enrique Pena Nieto wrote in his Twitter account that the federal attorney general's office "will analyze the whole report, to aid in its investigations." Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos, said authorities were investigating complaints filed by 31 people who said they had been tortured; he said six criminal cases had been opened, and had that three involved employees of the attorney general's office.

Angela Buitrago of the international experts group, left, hugs a relative of the 43 missing students, in Mexico City, Sunday, April 24, 2016. In a report released Sunday, the group said there is evidence that Mexican police tortured some of the key suspects arrested in the disappearance of the students. The 43 students have not been heard from since they were taken by local police in September 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state.​

Betanzos called the case "the most exhaustive investigation in the history of Mexican law enforcement." But the allegations of torture could endanger any chance of convictions in one of the highest-profile human rights cases in Mexican history, especially because the government's version of events - that corrupt police handed the students over to drug gang members who killed them and burned their bodies at a trash dump - hangs in large part on the testimony of some drug gunmen who now say they were tortured into confessing. "It is a lie the way they said they caught us," Patricio Reyes Landa said in testimony made public by the experts' report. "They went into the house, beating and kicking. They hauled me aboard a vehicle, they blindfolded me, tied my feet and hands, they began beating me again and gave me electric shocks, they put a rag over my nose and poured water on it. They gave me shocks on the inside of my mouth and my testicles. They put a bag over my face so I couldn't breathe. It went on for hours."

Mexican judges are instructed to throw out confessions based on torture; Betanzos said the government's case was not solely based on confessions. The group of experts complained the government was slow to deliver some of the evidence it had asked for; it criticized government prosecutor's investigations as flawed and incomplete, and suggested that the government wanted to stick to its version, without investigating possible involvement by federal police and the army. For example, the report said, the roadblocks set up on local highways around the city of Iguala on the night of the disappearances were far more extensive than previously thought. The roadblocks were apparently coordinated by the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel to trap rivals; the gang may have thought the students were part of a rival cartel.

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See also:

Mexico missing students: Government 'hampered' independent inquiry
Sun, 24 Apr 2016 - A panel of experts investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican trainee teachers in 2014 says the government hampered its inquiries.

A panel of international experts investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican trainee teachers in 2014 says the government of President Enrique Pena Neto has hampered its inquiries. In its scathing final report, the experts also dismissed the conclusions of the official inquiry. They said officials failed to pursue the investigative lines they suggested.

Relatives of the 43 missing students attend the delivery of the panel's final report in Mexico City​

The case provoked outrage in Mexico, leading to street protests against perceived impunity. "The delays in obtaining evidence that could be used to figure out possible lines of investigation translates into a decision (to allow) impunity," said the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) in its report. The panel was commissioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The trainee teachers went missing after taking part in a protest in the south-western city of Iguala, in Guerrero state, in September 2014. Mexican prosecutors said they were detained by corrupt policemen under the orders of the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, and handed over to a local criminal gang (Guerreros Unidos), who killed the 43 men and burned their bodies in a local landfill site. Relatives have always rejected this version, saying the government was trying to cover up the involvement of senior politicians and army officers in the killings.

Analysis from Katy Watson, BBC News, Mexico City

 

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Mexico usin' torture to get confessions in missing students case...

In Mexico missing students case, suspects allege torture
May 10,`16 -- Within weeks of the September 2014 disappearance of 43 college students, Mexican authorities had rounded up scores of suspects and announced they had solved the case.

At a hastily called news conference, prosecutors showed video of drug gang members confessing to taking the students from police, then slaughtering them and incinerating the bodies at a junkyard and dumping the evidence in a river. Two independent, international teams of experts subsequently cast doubt on the official investigation. Now, the government case has suffered another blow: Accusations of torture.

In previously unseen court documents obtained by The Associated Press, 10 of the suspects described a chillingly similar script: First the questions, then the punches, electric shocks and partial asphyxiations with plastic bags; then, finally, the threats to kill their loved ones unless they confessed to stories that backed up the government's line. Some said they were given planted evidence or prefabricated stories to support the government's conclusions.

Police stand guard around the state Congress building, as people pass by outside the fence, some yelling taunts and hurling rocks, on the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 rural college students in Chilpancingo, Mexico. Within weeks of the September 2014 disappearance of students, Mexican authorities had rounded up scores of suspects and announced they had solved the case. But two independent, international teams of experts subsequently cast doubt on the official investigation, and now the government case has suffered another blow: Accusations of torture by federal police or government troops who arrested the suspects on suspicion of ties to the notoriously violent Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.​

Medical reports published last month by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission appear to confirm the allegations of torture. Of the 10 case files obtained by the AP, the group reviewed five, and it found credible evidence of torture in all of them. "They were giving me electric shocks in the testicles and all over my body," one of the suspects, Patricio Reyes Landa, a gang member who was detained a month after the students vanished, told a judge in July, according to the documents obtained by AP. "All this time, it was about two and a half hours, I was blindfolded and they were hitting me." "A person came up and took off my blindfold and showed me a photo of my family - my two daughters, my wife and my brother," he said. "He said if I didn't do everything they told me to, they were going to rape my daughters. ... I told them I was going to do everything they asked."

Reyes Landa's testimony is crucial to the government case because he was among the first to confess to killing the students and burning their bodies at a dump in the town of Cocula, before their charred remains were tossed in the nearby San Juan River. Apart from those confessions and a single bone fragment that was linked through DNA testing to one of the students, the prosecution has almost no other evidence. Under Mexican law a confession obtained by torture is not admissible in court. "If the confessions are tossed out and there is no other evidence, basically there is no case," said Denise Gonzalez, a specialist in human rights and international law at Mexico's Ibero-American University.

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Zeron resigns from his position as Chief Director at Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency...

Mexico deserves criticism over handling of disappearance of 43 students
Friday 16th September, 2016 | Washington, DC—The resignation of Tomas Zeron from his position as Chief Director at Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency (Agencia de Investigacion Criminal, AIC) within the Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Republica, PGR) could represent an opening to move forward with the investigation into the enforced disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero.

While at the AIC, Zeron was implicated in obstructing the investigation and manipulating evidence in the Ayotzinapa case. However, despite these serious accusations, President Pena Nieto has named Zeron as Technical Secretary of Mexico’s National Security Council (Consejo de Seguridad Nacional).

“Zeron’s appointment to the National Security Council sends a disturbing message that senior officials implicated in serious wrongdoing will not be punished, but rather promoted. While Zeron’s departure from the PGR is important, the Mexican government should not be let off the hook from investigating him and other officials involved in the obstruction of justice in the case,” affirms Maureen Meyer, WOLA Senior Associate for Mexico. “Zeron did not act on his own; he formed part of a broader effort within the Mexican government to invent a ‘historic truth’ about what happened to the students that has been proven again and again to be false.”

The international Group of Experts—appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to provide technical assistance to the Mexican government in the Ayotzinapa case—revealed grave irregularities in Zeron’s role in the investigation, including the possible manipulation of evidence. In a video presented by the Group of Experts and included below, Zeron is seen at Rio San Juan where plastic bags containing burned remains were discovered and where a bone fragment from one of the students was identified—the only positive identification in the case. Official government records show that the bags were discovered by Marine divers on October 29; however, this video shows Zeron at the river with the plastic bags and a key suspect that had been taken out of custody on October 28—a day before the evidence was officially recorded as being found. “The government’s failure to investigate and sanction Zeron’s actions and those of other officials who allegedly tampered with evidence and tortured suspects makes it clear that the government is protecting its own and that there will be no consequences for those involved in the cover-up,” said Meyer.

Nearly two years after the Ayotzinapa students were attacked and disappeared, the case remains unresolved and there have been zero convictions. Moving into the second anniversary of the students’ tragic disappearance on September 26 and 27, the Mexican government has the opportunity to demonstrate to the students’ families, the Mexican population, and the international community that Zeron’s departure will mean pursuing the lines of investigation proposed by the Group of Experts, full cooperation with the Inter-American Commission’s follow-up mechanism, renewing searches for the disappeared students, and investigating and sanctioning authorities that obstructed justice, tortured suspects, and tampered with evidence. The failure to do so will show the Mexican government’s unwillingness to uncover the truth and achieve justice.

Mexico deserves criticism over handling of disappearance of 43 students