MEXICO CITY — A group of international experts investigating the 2014 disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico denounced the attorney general Thursday, saying he engaged in “improper interference” and created “obstacles” to justice, apparently in a rush to show results.
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts was created by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate the Sept. 26, 2014, abduction and forced disappearance of students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in the state of Guerrero.
Group members at a news conference also raised doubts about some evidence included in a report last month from the government Truth Commission investigating the case.
They also said there is additional evidence of the close relationship between the military and a local drug gang that have both been implicated in the students’ disappearance in the city of Iguala.
They spoke just two days after the special prosecutor who had led the government’s investigation since 2019 resigned.
The experts said Omar Gómez Trejo quit after his independent work was blocked by Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero. Ángela Buitrago, one of the experts, said Gómez Trejo was not willing to follow orders “that have no justification.”
Among examples of the purported “improper interference,” the group mentioned the cancelation without explanation of 21 arrest orders announced previously by the Attorney General’s Office, including for 16 members of the military. Claudia Paz, another of the experts, said the withdrawal of those arrest orders did not conform with the rule of law.
The experts also said the rush to charge former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, who was in office when the students disappeared, with manufacturing the previous administration’s account of what happened could ultimately jeopardize the case against him.
Such practices lead one to think “there was an attempt to synchronize judicial times with political times … that came from the attorney general of the republic,” said Francisco Cox, another member of the group. He added that the current administration appeared to put more value on arrests than in arriving at convictions.
The evidence of close contact between the military and the local drug gang in Iguala continues to grow. However, group members said they continued to be denied military intelligence, even though President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered the armed forces to give them…
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