A panel of independent specialists looking into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Mexico stated they were ending their investigation because they were denied access to critical evidence by the government.
The students vanished while visiting the city of Iguala in the southwest of Mexico. The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), a group of lawyers and medical professionals, is in Mexico to look into their disappearance.
The experts, however, announced they would be ending the inquiry and departing the nation next week after giving their final fact-finding report on Tuesday due to a number of obstacles.
The Prosecutor’s Office must criticise and look into the failure to submit available information for the investigation of heinous occurrences like these, according to the GIEI report.
At a morning press conference on Tuesday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador stated that his administration was “going to continue the investigation.”
On September 26, 2014, the college-aged students from a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa vanished as they passed through the city of Iguala in the southwest on their way to a protest in Mexico City.
Since the vast majority of the missing pupils were never located, it is still unclear exactly what transpired.
Later, buses with shattered windows and blood were observed in the city’s streets. Those who survived from the original 100-person group claimed that armed police officers and troops had stopped their buses and then suddenly opened fire.
At least 83 arrest warrants for suspects in the 2014 disappearance were issued by a Mexican court in August of last year, but nobody has been found guilty as of yet.
several military leaders, troops, police officers, administrative, and judicial officials are among the several individuals who have been charged with “organised crime, forced disappearance, torture, homicide, and crimes against the administration of justice.”
The GIEI specialists claimed that up until a “critical point in August 2022,” the inquiry was subject to pressures and challenges like “lack of information,” “secrecy,” and “hidden evidence.”
The group further claimed that the GIEI was compelled to stop the inquiry in 2016 and was only allowed back in 2020 by President Obrador’s newly elected government, who had promised to look into the disappearance during his campaign.
According to GIEI member Carlos Beristain, “the withholding of that information has contributed not only to the concealment of government responsibilities, but it has constituted in itself a responsibility of the state in the disappearance of these young men.”
He continued, “Access to information has only been partial and another part of it continues to be hidden.”
Another panellist, Angela Buitrago, said that crucial intelligence files were unavailable to the experts.
She explained, “That requirement was to have all the data that was in the files that had not been examined, like intelligence files.
“We are leaving because we cannot move further without that information. The reason we are leaving Mexico is because, “Really, we have delivered this report with what could be done, but we cannot move forward without that information.” she added