Special team to probe Mexico missing

Their story has transformed Mexico, a country brutalized by nearly a decade of drug war and crime that have killed more than 164,000 people, by the government’s count.

The students were on their way to the capital to remember the hundreds of victims of the 1968 massacre ordered by the then President and carried out by the police and the army. They stoically decline to concede that the chance their sons will be found grows ever more remote.

“It still hurts in my heart”, Emiliano Navarrete said. “We focus everything on looking for our sons”. But internationally-recognized independent investigators have raised serious concerns about both the methodology of the official investigation and irregularities in the physical evidence. Mexicans will be sceptical of his intentions, believing so far that his administration has been prevaricating and stalling on the issue.

The rurales have never gone down well with the clergy and the government for their insistence on social justice and political activism.

Parents and classmates of the missing students have expressed dissatisfaction with the official investigation and what they say is indifference and incompetence on the part of police, public officials and politicians.

They cited work by Jose Torero, a well-known expert on fire who had conducted field work, examined the evidence and reviewed the statements of the suspects in the case.

In Washington, there’s another question: How much longer can the United States government give Mexico millions in security aid ($194 million this year) and watch as atrocities pile up?

“We think the military has them”, says Tlatempa Bello. “Perhaps (the pope) could do something for us … could help us pressure the Mexican government”. Ayotzinapa shattered at once the image of stability, cohesion, and economic modernization so carefully crafted by president Peña Nieto since the moment he took office in 2012. Forty-three other students simply disappeared without trace. But that claim is dubious.

A lawyer for the parents said in an interview later that the president used the meeting, which ran for almost three hours, to “defend the historical truth” as presented by former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam earlier this year, a version the parents have rejected. Case closed.

“It’s cosmetic”, intrusion specialist Alejandro Hope advised AFP.

The conclusions of the case have been disputed by the parents.

“Our governments need to learn how to accept their mistakes”, said María de Jesús Tlatempa Bello, mother of one of the missing students.

Pena Nieto told the families that he would create a new special prosecutor for all of the country’s thousands of missing people. In 2013, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said it had received 1,505 complaints of torture and other forms of ill-treatment, 600% more than in 2003.

“All the attacks against the students were directed at stopping the buses leaving Iguala”, Carlos Beristain, one of the experts who assembled the report, told a press conference following the release of the report.