With broken voices, Ángela Buitrago and Carlos Beristain said goodbye “sad and frustrated” to the experience of collaborating from the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) to try to find out the fate of the 43 normalistas from Ayotzinapa, who disappeared almost nine years ago. .
During the presentation of their last work report, on Tuesday the 25th at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, an appointment that the Undersecretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration, Alejandro Encinas, did not attend, the specialists left more than evident how impenetrable the “hard core” of the Mexican State, that is, the Armed Forces, and that, given the refusal to provide valuable information, the presence of the GIEI was idle.
Already in September of last year, after the crisis caused by the request of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR) to the Judiciary to cancel 21 arrest warrants, 16 of them against soldiers, and the resignation of the head of the Special Unit for the Investigation of the Ayotzinapa Case (UEILCA), Omar Gómez Trejo, the GIEI was diminished with the departure of two other of its members, Claudia Paz y Paz and Francisco Cox, at which time the group also denounced the lack of delivery of information by of the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena).
“To resolve the case, all the information that the State has had since the day of the events is needed to find out the fate and whereabouts of the young people or, in their case, it was known, it was done or it was not done… The muscle of the State was present and they did not protect. They know and they knew what happened… The risk we have faced is that lies are institutionalized as a response, which is unacceptable”, the experts highlighted in their final message to the fathers and mothers of the 43 normalistas and civil society who attended to the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center
Despite the fact that that same morning, in his daily conference, President López Obrador attributed the departure of the experts to practically a personal decision, the experts insisted that the lack of transparency of the Armed Forces forces them to leave, without complying with the Precautionary Measure 409/2014 of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that gave rise to the GIEI, whose objective was to clarify the whereabouts of the students.
“What’s going to happen from here on out? We do not know, what has not been a response to our demands – Beristain pointed out in the question and answer session. We have demanded that it be possible to give information that we know exists. The orders have been given, there is a breach of that. What’s up with that? Aren’t there consequences? We do not know, but we are not the ones who are going to be able to do more in that direction.”
Although the experts made it clear that the case does not end with his departure, since it is a forced disappearance, classified as a continuous crime that only ends when the truth is reached, in addition to the fact that the UIELCA was left with the task of attending to the minus “200 evidentiary petitions”, Beristain warned that the dimension of the case goes beyond knowing what happened to the 43, in a country that exceeds 111,000 disappeared people.
“You have to give access to that information; Not only do we need it, the representatives, the fathers, the mothers need it, the country needs it to be able to clarify a case, which is not only a case of disappearance that touches a specific group, but also touches on structural aspects of the functioning of the institutions and structural aspects of democracy in the country,” he said.
Angela Buitrago recounted the lies on which the “historical truth” was built and that the GIEI had to dismantle, a version that was supported “by more than 200 people from six corporations.”
He elaborated on the official version of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, which placed the incineration of young people in the Cocula dump as the final destination: “It was built on torture (…) we are talking about an operation to falsify arrests and (official) reports. where it has been judicially demonstrated (…) that they are building a presentation document where authorities say that they captured but did not capture, ‘we captured today’, when they were arrested three days ago, and that is a historical lie that has been maintained until recently very little (…) The control of the lie was from beginning to end”
Given the forcefulness of the evidence against the version of the Cocula dump, which continues to hold people in custody, Buitrago recommends that the FGR “make serious decisions about expelling these statements that lead to the Cocula dump, there is no legal or legal possibility to continue talking about the Cocula garbage dump”.
In conclusion, Carlos Beristain highlighted that the Ayotzinapa case is emblematic because “it has shown a modus operandi of a good part of the State apparatus”, but that international support to carry out an effective investigation and locate the shortcomings, and above all that it be resolved , “it is a lever for change, it is an opportunity for Mexico, hopefully there will be a collective reflection on justice mechanisms in the country.”
Criminality and State
After the departure of the experts, representatives of three of the organizations that have accompanied the fathers and mothers of the 43 on this long walk for truth and justice, the Agustín Pro Juárez Rights Center (Centro Prodh), the Rights Center Humanos de la Montaña Tlachinollan and Fundar Analysis and Research Center, analyze the relevance of the GIEI in the case and the impact that its revelations have for the country.
In separate interviews, Santiago Aguirre, director of the Prodh Center; Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer from Tlachinollan, and Humberto Guerrero, from Fundar, agree in positively assessing the work of the GIEI, despite the fact that the young people were not located.
Vidulfo Rosales Sierra considers that the great contribution of the GIEI was to avoid that during the government of Enrique Peña Nieto the case was closed with the “historical truth”, which concluded that the 43 were burned in the Cocula dump, and even, “in the The facts had stopped being searched for”, the social mobilization that opposed the official version had begun to be repressed, and “a discourse was generated that delegitimized what we did, when we stated that it did not square with the government’s thesis”.
Permanent companion of fathers and mothers in their mobilizations, Rosales Sierra acknowledges that it was the GIEI, through a scientific expert opinion, that demonstrated the infeasibility of the Cocula garbage dump being the final destination of young people: “With them the lines of to investigate drug trafficking, to analyze cell phones and the participation of the Army as a line that had to be explored, and in that the GIEI opened a gap”.
He adds that, in his second term, with López Obrador in the Presidency, “the foundations were already laid: the two GIEI reports, the UN-DH report on torture of detainees, and the sentence of a Reynosa Collegiate Court. The government did not provide more elements.
Without detracting from the intention of López Obrador and Alejandro Encinas to solve the case, says Rosales Sierra, “what we see is that the will is not enough, it comes up against the Armed Forces and the permanence of people who fabricated the historical truth within the FGR”.
He denies the president’s statements in the sense that his government already knows what happened to the students, since “there are no elements that explain to the fathers and mothers of the 43 why there was a state operation of such magnitude to make their children disappear.” children. The hypotheses in the file that they were confused with members of a rival drug trafficking group or that it was because they mistakenly took a truck loaded with drugs are not enough to explain the viciousness against them, even less now that we know that the Army had infiltrators. to the students”.
For the director of the Prodh Center, one of the great contributions of the GIEI is having “x-rayed” the Mexican justice system “and how the impunity mechanisms work in the country.”
From his point of view, his work is relevant in his fight to have access to the interventions made by the United States government, through its anti-drug agency (the DEA), of communications between members of the Guerreros Unidos gang during the period in which the mass disappearance occurred.
“The contribution with the wiretaps in Chicago is unprecedented. Thanks to the GIEI and the follow-up that the prosecutor later did for the case, they were able to access communication interventions by a criminal group that very forcefully show the communication vessels between criminality and the State,” Aguirre highlights.
The director of the Prodh Center recalls that, among the intercepted communications, it was possible to identify links between members of the criminal group with military commanders from Iguala, from battalions 41 and 27, which “represents a reality that is not from the past but which is from the present, the Army has not changed and it is a warning for the future of what can happen to the country if it continues to militarize without counterweights or controls”.
He points out that what the departure of the GIEI revealed in the face of the lack of information from the Army is that, “indeed, the Army is an obstacle to the transformation of the country, which has been given everything: budget, powers, discursive protection, trust … but that in return he has given nothing, neither on the issue of the ‘dirty war’ nor on Ayotzinapa”, issues for which López Obrador has created special commissions.
“If in these cases, with the attention that the current administration has paid to it, it continues without accountability, what can be expected in other cases of human rights violations committed by the Armed Forces that continue to be presented, including those committed by the National Guard ”, questions Santiago Aguirre.
In turn, Humberto Guerrero indicates that, with his departure, the GIEI sends “a very forceful message to all of Mexican society: beware of the Armed Forces, they have real power that is preventing progress in the investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, but surely also some other cases that do not have all the political support and technical assistance that Ayotzinapa has, from society to allies within the government. And even then you can’t with the Army”.
Fundar’s lawyer calls to be attentive to what President López Obrador will do, beyond the fact that he has publicly come out to defend Sedena and Semar, by maintaining that they have collaborated with the investigation:
“We are going to see if he uses a little of the rest of the legitimacy that he has left to move something within the Armed Forces or if this remains the case, if this last scenario is the case, and he insists that information can be sought from other sources, we will opens up a very dark perspective as a country.
“If this president, who claims that the Armed Forces have civilian control because he is a civilian, and with his levels of legitimacy, fails to get things moved inside, his statement is called into question and leaves the country at a crossroads. What awaits us with a presidency that does not have the levels of popularity and legitimacy like those of López Obrador?
