Mexico: witness to disappearance of 43 students alleges soldiers involved in attack

[Judi Lynn]

Witness testified soldiers detained group of students, interrogated them and then handed them to a drug gang

Reuters in Mexico City
Thu 21 Jan 2021 15.02 EST

A witness to the disappearance of 43 Mexican student teachers has alleged that soldiers were involved in the 2014 attack , the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has confirmed.

The disappearance of the trainees from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College on 26 September 2014 rocked Mexico, sparking widespread protests and calls for justice, but the investigation into the case has been widely criticized.

This week the newspaper Reforma reported that a witness, known as “Juan”, had testified that soldiers detained a group of the students, interrogated them at the army base in the town of Iguala and then handed them to a drug gang.

The former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos, recently arrested on US drug charges that were later dropped, long refused to allow investigators access to soldiers at the base for questioning over their possible involvement in the massacre.

The witness said members of the Guerreros Unidos gang cut up some of the students with machetes and took their remains to a crematorium controlled by the gang, while others were dissolved in acid, Reforma reported.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/21/mexico-witness-ayotzinapa-rural-teachers-college-disappearance-soldiers

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Some people may remember these students were discussed at DU years ago. Appalling:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/110843959

(The dirty mayor sent the local police after them, it was learned.)

[abqtommy]

1. I remember the news of this when it happened. Apalling? Horrifying? Yes...

[Mike 03]

2. A major story that shouldn't be forgotten.

There's a short, powerful and chilling book about this atrocity by Sergio González Rodríguez entitled The Iguala 43: The Truth and Challenge of Mexico's Disappeared Students. Although it enumerates many facts of the case it is, typical of Rodriguez, a philosophical/existential exploration of the failure of law and order, in the same vein as The Femicide Machine, a meditation on the murder of the women of Juarez.

He was a stupendous journalist/philosopher who died too young and who concerned himself with crucial stories he feared would drop from sight.