Mexican Government Faulted by International Team of Experts Investigating the Disappearance of the 43 “Normalistas” from Ayotzinapa

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Experts from the outside group of investigators (the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, or GIEI, created by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IACHR) examined the Mexican government’s version of events surrounding the mass kidnapping and presumed murder of the 43 male students from the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa. They ended their work on a note of frustration and only thinly veiled condemnation.  The “normalistas” went missing in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26, 2014 when they were waylaid, attacked, and disappeared by a group of local police and drug cartel members.  This, the GIEI’s second report, weighed in at 608 pages and offered a devastating critique of the government’s narrative.  It also called out the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto and his Attorney General’s Office, the Procurador General de la República (PGR), for its obstruction, obfuscation, and use of torture during its investigation.  The five researchers, Colombian lawyers Alejandro Valencia and Ángela Buitrago, Guatemalan lawyer Claudia Paz y Paz, Chilean lawyer Francisco Cox, and Spanish psychiatrist Carlos Beristain, said that from the beginning the Mexican government did not seem to want to get to the bottom of the tragedy. In particular they said there was no evidence that the students’ bodies were burned at a garbage dump in Cocula.