Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday defended the investigation headed by the Undersecretary of Human Rights of the Ministry of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, into the 2014 disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students after criticism from the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI).
The GIEI, which is independently investigating the case, revealed on Monday «inconsistencies» about screenshots from the instant messaging app Whatsapp, which show conversations of members of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group.
In this sense, the organization dismissed the evidence by considering that it was not possible to guarantee its «authenticity», since in some of the images appeared tools such as the ‘double check’, invented two months after the disappearance.
«We have full confidence in Alejandro Encinas, he is a man of integrity, honest, incapable of falsifying information, and we have all the elements to support the investigation,» said the Mexican president, as reported by the newspaper ‘Milenio’.
López Obrador has denied that there has been «haste» in the investigation works, while he has indicated that there are «solid elements and sufficient evidence», so these accusations of «fabrication of evidence» respond to the «fervent desire of conservatism» so that the Government does not comply with the investigation.
The 43 students of the Normal School of Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, disappeared in the early hours of September 27, 2014 in the neighboring municipality of Iguala during a protest against local authorities.
The first official version was that they were caught by the criminal organization Los Rojos, as part of a settling of scores between rival groups, and that hitmen killed and incinerated them and disposed of their remains in the Cocula landfill, facts later refuted by a new investigation.
In September 2020, a last investigation by the Attorney General’s Office contemplated the negligence and irregularities allegedly committed by the authorities of the former government of former President Peña Nieto. This new investigation points to the fact that the youths were chased and killed by municipal police.
Omar Gómez Trejo, the prosecutor in charge of the case, resigned at the end of September, a departure that several high-ranking officials attributed to his disagreement with respect to requesting arrests such as that of former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam during Enrique Peña Nieto’s term in office.
The Attorney General’s Office has recently revoked more than twenty arrest warrants for military personnel from Iguala, in addition to that of former Guerrero prosecutor Iñaki Blanco, who opened the investigation into the Ayotzinapa case, and that of State Security Secretary Leonardo Vázquez Pérez.
