Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Wednesday his administration will accept a truth commission to investigate the case of 43 teachers-college students missing since Sept. 26, 2014, drawing rare praise and expressions of hope from the long-suffering parents of the victims.
Wednesday marked the fourth anniversary of the students' abduction by corrupt police in the southern city of Iguala. Prosecutors say the police turned the students over to a drug gang, which allegedly killed them and incinerated their bodies. But apart from charred bone fragments matched to one student, their bodies have never been found.
Parents of the 43 missing youths met with Lopez Obrador, and in a tear-filled news conference afterward said they had hope for the first time in four years.
“This is the first day in all these last four years that we parents feel hope that we will get the truth,” said Epifanio Alvarez, his voice shaking. “This is the first day that a government has said to us, ‘We are going to help, we are going to get to the truth.’”
“God willing we will get to hug our children, God willing we will arrive at the truth,” Alvarez said.
Another parent, Maria Elena Guerrero, said the new investigative commission would be coordinated with a group of experts from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, the United Nations and Mexico’s own Human Rights Commission. “Without truth there is no justice,” she said.
Lopez Obrador said he would issue a decree to create the commission when he takes office Dec. 1. He called the parents of the 43 “an example for everyone fighting for justice in Mexico and the world.”
It was a break from years of suspicion, deceit and mistrust during which official investigators were accused of manipulating evidence, torturing suspects and trying to channel the entire investigation toward a single, terrible hypothesis: That the students were killed and their bodies incinerated in a huge fire at a garbage dump outside the southern city of Iguala.
But international experts and the victims’ parents cast doubt on that theory, and want a more thorough probe of the possible involvement of the army or other authorities.
Meanwhile, students and victims’ parents have engaged in a series of violent protests outside army barracks and on highways, in which gasoline bombs have been thrown and trucks and buses hijacked.
In June, a federal court ordered the government to create the truth commission due to doubts about the investigation. But the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto has appealed that ruling, saying there is no provision for such an investigative body in the Mexican legal system.
Pena Nieto tweeted Wednesday, “four years after the regrettable events in Iguala, the government is committed to the victims’ families and to justice.”
Pena Nieto has said he remained convinced of the massive fire theory. But the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a report saying that 34 of the 129 people arrested in connection with the students’ disappearance had suffered torture.
