Mexico hampered probe into apparent student massacre, panel says

A panel of international experts has accused Mexico’s government of undermining their inquiry into the fate of 43 trainee teachers apparently massacred in 2014, the most notorious human rights case in Mexico in recent years. The independent panel said the government’s stonewalling stopped it from reaching the truth as it wraps up its work and prepares to leave Mexico. The attorney general’s office, the panel said, did not let members re-interview detainees accused of the crime or obtain other information in a timely fashion. At a 2-½-hour news conference on Sunday attended by more than 1,000 people, the experts cast doubt on aspects of the government’s version of events.

We feel that from January there was someone giving instructions to halt everything.

One of the experts, Angela Buitrago

Mexico’s government says that corrupt police in late 2014 handed the student teachers in the south-western city of Iguala over to drug gang henchmen, who believed the trainees had been infiltrated by a rival gang. They then incinerated them at a garbage dump in the south-western Mexican state of Guerrero. While the experts’ probe showed the municipal police were mainly responsible for the disappearance of the students, they said the federal police should also be investigated. "There seems to be no limit to the Mexican government’s utter determination to sweep the Ayotzinapa tragedy under the carpet,“ Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara-Rosa said.

With openness, responsibility and adherence to the law, the (attorney general’s office) will keep working so that there is justice.

President Enrique Pena Nieto

Mexico students