The former attorney general who oversaw Mexico’s original investigation into the 2014 disappearances of 43 students from a radical teachers’ college will go to trial on charges of forced disappearance, not reporting torture and official misconduct, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam conceded there may have been “errors” in the investigation, but he said that in the eight years since no one has been able to prove another version of what happened to the students in the Guerrero state city of Iguala.
Murillo Karam, 74, served as attorney general from 2012 to 2015, under then-President Enrique Peña Nieto. He was arrested by agents of the office he used to lead last week for allegedly creating a false version about the students’ disappearances.
The judge also ruled that Murillo Karam remains in jail as the case moves forward.
Murillo Karam announced in 2014 that the students had been abducted by local police, turned over to a drug gang, killed, their bodies burned at a garbage dump, and the remains dumped in a river. He called it the “historic truth.”
But independent investigations and the current Attorney General’s Office have discounted that version. They assert that various levels of authorities were involved, including security forces, and that evidence and crime scenes were altered. There were also instances of torture, improper arrest, and mishandling of evidence that have since allowed most of the directly implicated gang members to walk free.
On Wednesday, Murillo Karam told the judge that there could have been “errors,” problems, and things that they did poorly, but that no one had been able to present another version of what happened to the students.
He took aim at a group of Argentine forensic experts who conducted their own investigation and raised questions about the government’s version of events.
“For six or seven years they have looked for an alternative, they’ve made up a lot of things and all of it collapses,” Murillo Karam said.
Source: Excelsior
Mexico Daily Post
