Parents of missing Mexican students demand new investigation
The meeting between the parents and Peña Nieto, only the second since the disappearance on the night of September 26, 2014, took place in a Mexico City museum in the early afternoon. “From the experts we have gotten a lot, from Pena Nieto, nothing”, she said.
The families of the young men gathered under a white tarp in front of Mexico City’s cathedral at the historic Zocalo square and declared the start of their protest at 7:00 pm (0000 GMT).
Sanchez said after the meeting that there was not a clear timeframe for when the demands would be answered, but that it would be done promptly.
Eduardo Sanchez, the president’s spokesman, told reporters after the closed-door meeting that the families had presented eight demands and that Pena Nieto had instructed his Cabinet to analyze each and get back to them. “You and I are looking for the same thing”.
But he stopped short of authorizing a new worldwide probe or promising to review former-Attorney General Jesus Murillo and other officials’ involvement in the investigation for possible obstruction of justice, as the families had sought. “We’re not going to give up; we’re going to continue searching”.
The disappearance of the students enrolled at the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a teacher-training institution in the southern state of Guerrero, “is one of the worst human rights tragedies in Mexico’s recent history”, she said. Dozens of students from Ayotzinapa’s rural teachers school in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, were intercepted by police as they were about to hold a protest at a conference led by the mayor’s wife in the city of Iguala.
Prosecutors say police then delivered the young men to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which killed them and incinerated their bodies after confusing them with rivals.
The families asked the government to launch a new internationally supervised investigation and to review Mexico’s own investigators, after global experts cast doubt on Mexico’s official account of the incident.
The government has said that it has identified two of the students from the burned remains recovered from a river in Cocula.
Independent experts appointed by the IACHR, after six months of investigations have concluded there was no evidence to prove the students were burned at the garbage dump.
The meeting’s agenda will deal with four topics: research, investigation, care for victims and public policy, said the subsecretary of Human Rights – who depends on the Ministry of Interior, Roberto Campa Cifrian. Sanchez confirmed Thursday that worldwide experts would be involved in a third investigation of the alleged incineration site.