On Government Lies, Human Bonfires and the Search for Truth
By Laura Carlsen
CIP Americas Program, Friday, September 25, 2015
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32959-on-government-lies-human-bonfires-and-the-search-for-truth?tmpl=component&print=1
One Year Since the Crime of Ayotzinapa
"Tell us the truth about what you find, even though it hurts, make sure it's
the truth"
-Families of the 43 Disappeared Students of Ayotzinapa to the Group of
Experts
It was always too cut-and-dried to believe.
On Jan. 27, then-Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam came out with the
government's version of events in Iguala, Guerrero on the terrible night of
Sept. 26, when six people were murdered and 43 students disappeared.
His narrative went like this: The students on the buses were taken by
corrupt local police in Iguala, delivered to the criminal group Guerreros
Unidos, executed and burned to ashes at the town dump of Cocula nearby.
Murillo Karam declared his conclusions to be "the historic truth."
The motive given was a little less clear, but had to do with feuding drug
cartels, a case of mistaken identity, and a despotic mayor in cahoots with
organized crime.
This version is based almost entirely on testimony from members of the
criminal organization. Following the announcement of his conclusions,
Murillo Karam effectively called off the search for the missing students,
rhetorically buried the 43 and closed one of the most egregious and
embarrassing cases in the history of Mexico.
But history has a way of coming back to bite. A group of five prestigious
experts named by the Interamerican Human Rights Commission to investigate
the assassinations and disappearances of the students delivered a report
Sept. 6 that shattered the government's version. The 560-page report,
presented to a packed audience of families, reporters and supporters, cited
numerous flaws, contradictions and omissions in the government's
investigation and conclusions.
With the expert's report, the "historic truth" presented by the Pena Nieto
administration will be remembered as the historic lie.
The government's central thesis that the bodies were burned has gone down in
flames. Forensic experts consulted by the Interdisciplinary Group found that
a fire capable of destroying 43 human bodies beyond recognition (according
to the Attorney General the ashes yielded only one DNA identification, later
followed by a second following release of the report) would be so huge it
would have required massive amounts of fuel and burned a far larger area,
among other anomalies. The report states:
"...we have arrived at the conviction that the 43 students were not
incinerated in the Cocula town dump. The confessions of the alleged
perpetrators on this point do not correspond to the reality of the evidence
presented in this study."
That alone is serious. Several of the criminals who confessed have claimed
that they were tortured in custody. This is common practice in Mexico to
close cases.
Then add to the debunked account of the human bonfire: ballistics tests that
were never performed, destroyed and "lost" evidence including surveillance
videos and police recordings of the moment of the attacks, bungled
autopsies, witnesses who can't get their stories straight, armed forces who
consider themselves above the law and refuse to be questioned, inexplicable
cruelty in letting victims bleed out without medical attention, and a host
of other acts so systematically inept that incompetency is no longer a
viable excuse and a clear pattern of suppression of truth emerges.
Why was the government in such a hurry to close the case by shunting the
blame off to organized crime? Why insist on a "historic truth" that was not
only untrue, but also demonstrably lacking in coherency and common sense?
The experts' report doesn't explain this haste, but it confirms it. It
throws out the motives that Murillo Karam had presented to the public. The
first claim, that the mayor thought the students were planning to disrupt
his wife's political event, falls when the team of experts shows that the
event was well over by the time the students arrived. The second, that
Guerreros Unidos thought the buses held members of a rival gang, is also
rejected:
"This possible motive is based solely on declarations of suspects and does
not consider that the different authorities were informed hours before of
the presence of students asking for money, who were not carrying arms and
who planned, after taking the buses, to leave the city."
In other words, the Iguala police who carried out the crime "knew they were
students."
The inescapable conclusion is that the authorities at the highest levels
have something to hide and reasons not to uncover the truth. Moreover, from
the outset they viewed the entire case as a problem of damage control rather
than truth-seeking.
Just days after the report came out, the Pena government announced that a
second victim had been identified. It looked like a move to bolster its
ruined theory. A group of Argentine forensic experts that has participated
in investigations immediately questioned the finding, claiming that the DNA
match for the second student, Jhosivani Guerrero, is low and that, like the
first remains identified, the remains were not found at the dump, but
supposedly in a bag in a nearby river. Since the forensic experts were not
invited to accompany government investigators as agreed on, they will not
vouch for the origin of the remains.
Protests Refuse to Disappear
What none of the reports consider is the tens of thousands of Mexicans that
have taken to the streets, carrying photographs of the missing students and
making their cause their own. The government wanted Ayotzinapa wiped off the
map - the school, its rabble-rousing youth, and later the movement and its
calls for justice.
Recall that the Pena administration faces a critical moment in its reform
plan, the historic moment when it auctions off Mexico's natural resources to
transnational bidders. These investors need to see stability and rule of
law. Not teaching college students with their faces ripped off.
Ayotzinapa revealed the underbelly of the Mexican political system right
when it needed to put forth its best face.
The reforms are a critical backdrop for the crime. As Vidulfo Rosales, human
rights activist and lawyer for the Ayotzinapa families explains:
"It's a student sector that protests, that goes out in the streets and that
also trains critical teachers... And today they're seriously questioning the
structural reforms, seriously questioning the unjust state of affairs.
They'll be professors who go out and establish relationships with the
communities, and contribute to the awakening among the people so that later
they can defend themselves from injustice. And obviously this makes the
state uncomfortable, and that's why there is a systematic attack against
them."
Forced disappearance is a crime of the state to hide other crimes. Odorless
and disembodied, it dissolves into oblivion when the loved ones are
forgotten or ignored.
The experts' report recognizes this:
"Forced disappearance of persons is a strategy to erase the footprints of
the crime, sowing confusion and ambiguity as a form of avoiding
investigation, the knowledge of facts, and to eliminate legal protections
for the victims. Whether carried out by agents of the state or by other
individuals with their support or acquiescence, it extends the terror of
suffering the same fate to all those who identify with the victims."
The marches and demonstrations in Mexico and worldwide are the only barrier
to getting away with what student survivor and spokesperson Omar Garcia
calls "the perfect crime."
"Forced disappearance is the commission of the perfect crime, one in which
the families are left in suspense, like on pause, with their pain and their
aspirations and frustrations. But they never lose hope..."
The expert report will give new impetus to the organizing for truth.
Throughout the country and in countries all over the world, groups have
formed to demand justice in the Ayotzinapa case with the cry of "It Was the
State!"
The mass forced disappearance has also spawned groups of family members who
have begun to search for their missing loved ones among the official count
of 25,230 disappeared in the country. After receiving only disdain and
indifference from government offices, they've taken matters into their own
hands.
They never give up. These men and women uncover clandestine graves every
week in Sinaloa, in Veracruz, in Chihuahua and, of course, in Guerrero,
where the group "The Other Disappeared" sets out every Sunday with shovels
in hopes of finding sons, daughters, brothers and husbands.
They have recovered more than a hundred bodies so far in the hills around
the teaching college, a deceptively tranquil-looking landscape sown with
corpses. Many risk coming face to face with the criminals or the corrupt
officials who murdered their relatives. Some have been assassinated, like
Miguel Jimenez Blanco, who helped found the group of citizen searchers in
Iguala and was shot to death on August 8 of this year.
These groups will mobilize on Sept. 26 to remember the crime and demand the
return of the students. They will again cry "It Was The State" and call for
justice. The Pena Nieto government will make a statement about resolving the
case. Thousands will yell, "They were taken alive; We want them back alive".
Their demand strikes a universal chord heard by mothers whose worst fear in
life is the loss of a child, activists who work for justice, Mexicans living
in the country or outside its borders.
And it is not a remote issue for US citizens. Besides Mexico's proximity and
shared history, the US government props up the Pena presidency even as his
administration lies to hide the truth about the students. The Merida
Initiative has provided $3 billion dollars to train and equip the same
security forces that murder, traffic, extort and rape.
Not always, not everyone and not everywhere, but often enough to reveal a
structural problem.
When the thousands march in Mexico City on the 26th, millions more will be
with them. If not in body, at least in spirit.
Laura Carlsen is Director of the CIP Americas Program at
www.cipamericas.org.
RELATED STORIES
Ayotzinapa's Uncomfortable Dead
By Charlotte Maria Saenz, Other Worlds | Op-Ed
Mexico's 43 Disappeared Students: Three Months Later
By Staff, AJ+ | Video Report