A LA JORNADA EDITORIAL

Court decides that representatives of the missing students’ parents and the National Human Rights Commission are the ones in charge of deciding the lines of investigation that must be followed and the evidence a desahogar in this case.

Yesterday, the first collegiate tribunal of the 19th Circuit in Tamaulipas, ordered the replacing of the procedure followed to date by the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) around the atrocities perpetrated the night of September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero, that resulted in six deaths and 43 teachers’ college students disappeared. In the judgment of that judicial body, the PGR’s investigation was not prompt, effective, independent or impartial, like the Inter-American Court on Human Rights and the established protocols of the United Nations demand.

To the extent that an independent prosecutors’ office is lacking in Mexico, magistrates Mauricio Fernández de la Mora (speaker), Juan Antonio Trejo Espinoza and Héctor Gálvez, decided on the creation of an investigatory commission for truth and justice (Iguala case) that must be composed of representatives of the victims, the National Human Rights Commission and the Federation’s Public Ministry, with the condition that the first two decide the lines of investigation to follow and the evidence a present, and that will have the ability to incorporate  national and international human rights organizations that they select into the investigation.

The decision is of undeniable importance, given that it opens a concrete possibility to clarifying an issue that for almost four years has been handled with an exasperating lack of grace on the part of the federal justice system, which still continues holding onto the unsustainable version the then head of the institution Jesús Murillo Karam presented at the end of 2014, according to which the young students were captured by Iguala municipal police and turned over to a criminal group that operates in that city, which would then have moved them to the neighboring Cocula to murder them and incinerate their bodies in the that locality’s municipal garbage dump. Scientists, academics and activists, as well as the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, reviewed the PGR’s conduct and disproved that version, which its author called “the historic truth,” from different technical points of view.

To make matters worse, the authority has been remiss in assuming lines of investigation of obvious interest, like the possibility that the young students had taken a bus that, without them knowing it, had been loaded with drugs destined for the United States, or the documentation of calls from some of the disappeared youths cell phones, which were made in the vicinity of the headquarters of the Center of Investigation and National Security and in the installations of Military Camp Number One, or the role played by members of the state and federal police and members of the military that were present in Iguala on the night of that episode of flagrant barbarism.

For almost four years such questions, and others, have gravitated in the conscience of the country at the side of the principal question: where are the disappeared youths and that did they do to them? The uncertainty in this regard and the carelessness of the authority responsible for seeking justice severely eroded the government’s institutional credibility, and contributed decisively to magnify the unpopularity of the current head of the federal Executive and, of course, have meant hell for the family members of the students of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, who have maintained an admirable struggle for more than 40 months to achieve clarification of what happened, the whereabouts of their boys and the procurement and imparting of real justice.

For its own good, it’s fitting to hope that the federal government will not fail to conform with the decision and will accept, although in its final stretch, collaborating fully and decidedly in the clarification of this case and in the identification of those most responsible. Taking votes is also pertinent because the truth commission will achieve delving into the reasons for an institutional performance so defective and insufficient that incubated in society the justified suspicion that the PGR’s entire investigation was and continues being a cover-up exercise that has damaged the country almost as much as the Iguala crime itself.

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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/06/05/opinion/002a1edi

Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee