“Cry at home and fight outside.” This is how Estela de Carlotto, president and founder of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, encouraged the Mexican mothers who are still looking for their disappeared people last week. In an act in Mexico City, the activist alluded to the Ayotzinapa case, also known as the Iguala case or the case of the 43 students. Nothing is known about these young people since September 26, 2014. Years of cumbersome investigation of which this Tuesday the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) presented its latest report.
“Hiding up and insisting on denying things that are obvious” These are the impediments that the organization found to carry out its work, mentioned the expert Carlos Beristain, in the presentation of the sixth report of the group, whose mandate ends this month and which has worked for more than eight years on this event that shocked the country.
“For the GIEI it is impossible to continue its mandate and since things do not change, we consider our work finished,” he continued. “The risk is that lies become institutionalized as a response”warned the Spaniard. “The muscle of the State was present, they acted and did not protect. They knew what happened, that has become a responsibility of the State in itself,” he concluded after an extensive presentation in which the contradictory versions were explained, that the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena) had constant communications with the different authorities on the day of the disappearance of the young people -the experts exposed maps of the movements of the security forces with the information obtained from C4, a surveillance center that has records of calls-, that the military were “adequate and the statements”, that there was manipulation of information and that the Navy was at the scene “on the 27th, not the 29th”.
Details were also given about the confusion about the whereabouts of the young people, who would have been divided into several groups and who were not taken “Neither to the same place, nor to the same stage, nor to the Cocula garbage dump”said Ángela Buitrago, the other member of the GIEI who appeared at the presentation on Tuesday.
Beristain insisted on the “intentionality” behind the “denials” and “lies.” In addition to ensuring that “the case is not closed until there is a resolution of the fate and whereabouts of the young people.” Buitrago, answering the journalists’ questions, assured that these types of cases can transcend the orbit of international justice, but that this already depends on the relatives, on whom he recognized the courage of those who have made a flag these years and for whom he asked the State for “attention”. “Comprehensive reparation must be carried out and avoid stigmatization”the expert Buitrago requested in her recommendations, since “the survivors are victims of the events.”