Carrying photographs of their children at their chests, relatives of 43 students who disappeared in southern Mexico in 2014 on Monday marched on the eighth anniversary of their abductions with conflicting sentiments.
On one hand, the government appeared to be advancing, but on the other they saw “internal wars” in an administration that “succumbs to military power,” the families said in a statement at the conclusion of the procession.
“There are a lot of contradictory things,” said Clemente Rodriguez, father of one of the students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college who were attacked by security forces and a drug gang in Guerrero State. “Sometimes they give us information: ‘Yes we’re going to act,’ but then we slip along the same way.”
Photo: AP
That same way being the lack of answers about what really happened that night in Iguala and what ultimately happened to the students, because the previous administration hid the truth and the current has only offered “partial advances,” Hilda Legideno, the mother of another student, read in the statement.
“They talk about the death of our sons, but they don’t show us proof,” she said.
Only small, burned bone fragments of three have been identified, including Rodriguez’s son Christian Alfonso.
In the past weeks, the Mexican Truth Commission, created by the current administration, declared it a “state crime,” because authorities at all levels of government were involved in the disappearances and cover-up.
It also provided new information confirming the involvement of the military.
There have also been arrests of three members of the army, including the man who had been the army commander in the area when the abductions occurred — now a retired general — as well as then-Mexican attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam, accused of inventing the government’s original account based on torture and manipulation of evidence.
However, some charges against dozens of other suspects have been tossed out because of tainted evidence.
Previously redacted details from the commission’s report were leaked to a Mexican newspaper that had not been shared with the families.
Spain’s El Pais newspaper published documents showing that the 16 arrest orders against other members of the military, which had been touted by the government, were quietly canceled without explanation.
All of which has outraged the families to the point that they called for the resignation of Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero.
The military’s alleged role has become sensitive. Alejandro Encinas, the head of the commission, said that the former base commander in Iguala had given the order to kill six of the students days after they were abducted.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador earlier on Monday promised that the investigation would continue.
The president also defended the army, saying that those arrested would be held accountable, but “that does not mean that the whole institution is responsible.”
Rodriguez, who has been a fixture in marches demanding justice in the case for the past eight years, said: “We were always pointing to the military bases and we are going to see it through to the bitter end.”
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS