Ayotzinapa Families Demand Files of 22 Police Linked to Case

Marking 17 months since municipal police in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked and disappeared the 43 Ayotzinapa students, their families and classmates held a series of protest rallies in Mexico City and Matamoros, across from the United States.

The families denounced that 22 of the police and presumed organized crime members implicated in the enforced disappearances are seeking a court injunction to be released on bail.

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A caravan of the families traveled to the northern border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas, some 600 miles north of Mexico City, to demand two federal judges publicly release the case files of the suspects involved in the tragic events of Sep. 26, 2014, and that they finally be formally charged for the crimes they allegedly committed.

In a rally held outside of the federal courthouse in Matamoros, Bernabe Abraham, father of disappeared student Adan Abraham de la Cruz, denounced the measures the authorities have taken to “fragmentize” the investigation, diverting resources and separating the detainees in the case to different locations in an apparent move to further complicate legal actions by the families of the 43 students.

“It is an impediment that we need to cross the entire country to come here to ask for copies of the case files, and they do this on purpose so that we need to fight our way, to tire us out, and to dissuade us from struggling. But they don’t want to understand that we parents from Guerrero do not get tired,” Abraham said.

Meanwhile, in Mexico City, outside of the country’s Supreme Court, hundreds of protesters, activists, and a group of classmates and families of the disappeared students held a rally.

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The families demand that the Supreme Court guarantees that the case files of the 22 detained police implicated in the crime be handed over to the group of independent experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. To date, Mexican authorities have not granted the group access to the documents.

On Sunday, the international experts released a new report in which they denounced the federal government for obstructing their work and putting justice in the case at risk.

The four-member team also denounced a media smear campaign that has sought to discredit their work locally and in their home countries.

Team member and former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz underscored the team’s concern which they raised in their first major initial report on the investigation in September that authorities have yet to adequately investigate and determine the motive behind the attack, which could likely be about drugs, as one of the buses the Ayotzinapa students were traveling in is suspected of having been loaded with heroin or other drugs headed for the United States.

“It is fundamental that the trafficking of heroin from Iguala to Chicago be investigated. It has begun, but we insist in the necessity that the proper procedures that we previously recommended be carried out so as to find clarity in the events,” said the Guatemalan lawyer.

Although the government’s hypothesis or so-called “historic truth” that the students were killed and incinerated by organized crime members in a garbage dump in the Guerrero State town of Cocula has been deemed “scientifically impossible” twice by two different independent forensic teams, growing criticism continues to mount that little resources have been provided to investigate the drug trafficking theory.

The international experts' report claims that there is evidence of a fifth bus which is now missing and that the federal government did not care to investigate until recently.