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Mexico's President Enrique Peña Nieto continues to insist organized mafias were responsible for the disappearance and death of the 43 Ayotzinapa students he says were incinerated in Cocula, Guerrero.
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In an interview with Mexican investigative reporter Denise Maerker, Peña Nieto said organized gangs "had to do" with the disappearance and death of the college students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' School in Ayotzinapa, who were on their way to a political event in Iguala.
"I have the conviction that unfortunately organized crime, which has permeated many areas of municipal governments, had to do with the disappearance," the outgoing president saud during the half-hour interview.
The president told Maerker that all evidence points to what the government concluded: corrupt local police kidnapped the students and gave them to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.
Nieto said mafia members killed then incinerated the young students in a garbage dump in the small town of Cocula, near Iguala. The Guerreros then threw their ashes into a river, according to the official government investigation.
"Parents know that a delinquent group operating out of Chicago, the United States with links to a group here called confirming the student deaths, asking them what did they do to the students? Dump,” said the president during the televised interview. "I think this is what happened if the investigation had errors and failures, well, it's open, and I think it's still going on."
The investigation by Nieto's administration has been widely criticized as unreliable and irregular due to allegations of forced and false confessions given under torture, contradictory testimonies, incompatible hypotheses and evidence tampering.
In early June a Tamaulipas state tribunal ordered the creation of an independent truth commission—Special Observing Mechanism for the Ayotzinapa Case (MESA)—to investigate the case. The move was backed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) whose experts agree that federal and state police, as well as military forces, were involved, which the government denies. Peña Nieto has yet to move forward with the truth commission.
Peña Nieto said he's sorry "for the parents' pain they had, that they to continue to have and that they have had all these years in demand of justice, demanding to know what happened to their children." Incoming President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has already agreed to begin MESA.
Nieto said his security strategy during his six-year term, which expires in December, has been "correct" but insufficient: "I've always believed that in order to be successful, the security strategy needs more investment."
A July 2017 report by Mexican think tank Ethos Public Policy Lab (Ethos Laboratorio de Politicas Publicas in Spanish) found that with a 61 percent increase in domestic security spending from 2008 to 2015 (Peña Nieto came into office in 2012), the country remains one of the world’s most violent, with 15 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Last year Mexico registered its highest murder rate on record: 29,168 killings.
"I apologize for the mistakes," Nieto concluded. "Sorry for the insufficiencies in various explanations. Moreover, if I wronged, if I hurt someone, I ask for their forgiveness. If someone was angry about how I governed, I apologize."
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