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On Monday, December 3, newly sworn-in President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) as one of his first acts as president, will meet with the parents of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students in the National Palace, to sign a presidential decree to open a free and independent investigation on the case.
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Mario Patron, director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, confirmed the meeting between President AMLO and the families of the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students. "We have already been summoned to the National Palace for the presentation of a decree for access to the truth in the case of Ayotzinapa," he said during an interview with renowned Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui.
"President of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will begin with the guideline in compliance with the agreements he made with the parents of the young students of Ayotzinapa," Patron added, remembering the agreements between AMLO and the Ayotzinapa parents. Said agreements were made on the fourth anniversary of the forced disappearance of the 43 students on November 26th.
During that meeting, AMLO promised the creation of an investigative commission to get to the bottom of the case, "This is important because it is not a Truth Commission in classical terms but an extraordinary justice mechanism," stated Patron.
As well in the meeting AMLO also promised political support for the families in order to get results, and that "the Undersecretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, would lead the effort to ensure that all the public administration cooperates in the investigation."
"If cases like Ayotzinapa's are not resolved, it is a lapidary message for other stories of serious human rights violations that do not have the representativeness of the Ayotzinapa case," Patron said. Arguing that solving the Ayotzinapa case could mean a way to restructure justice and truth, hand by hand with structuring a new institutional system that could solve other cases.
The government of AMLO, who will be sworn-in on Saturday, has already formally requested the presence of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) which investigated the Ayotzinapa case. The investigations by the GIEI discredited the Enrique Peña Nieto government's official version of the Ayotzinapa case findings, commonly known as the "Verdad Historica" (Historic Truth), which theorizes that the 43 students were likely killed and their bodies incinerated by criminal groups.
On Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' School of Ayotzinapa went to Iguala, Guerrero, for a political event where they were reportedly confronted and kidnapped by local police.
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