MEXICO CITY (CN) - It has been 11 years since 43 students at a rural teacher's college in Ayotzinapa were forcibly disappeared on the night of Sept. 26, 2014.
Years of independent and government reports show that police opened fire on the students after they commandeered buses to visit Mexico City for the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre - a nonviolent political tactic that had become a tradition in the state of Guerrero. Police then handed the students over to the drug gang, Guerreros Unidos.
Tomas Zeron, former head of the Criminal Investigation Agency who oversaw the initial investigation and was deemed responsible for the government's cover-up, is a fugitive from justice who fled to Canada and then Israel in 2019.
On Thursday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stated her commitment to pressure Israel for Zeron's extradition.
To this day, only three students' remains have been identified. Only during the last year were two people criminally convicted in connection with the students' disappearance, though they received lenient sentences through plea deals.
Adan Casarrubias Salgado, one of the ex-leaders of the Guerreros Unidos, was arrested in Mexico in 2015 on drug trafficking charges and extradited to the U.S. in 2022. In March, a judge sentenced him to 11 years after he pleaded guilty to coordinating heroin shipments in secret compartments of busses from Mexico to Chicago and coordinating money deliveries in the Chicago area.
Pablo Vega Cuevas, another key member of the Guerreros Unidos, was arrested in 2014 on federal narcotics charges in Oklahoma. He walked free in August after time served in pretrial detention as a result of his cooperation with a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into the Guerreros Unidos.
The two men were never questioned about the disappeared students even though DEA electronic intercepts - made public in full for the first time by the National Security Archive on Friday - show text messages between the two men reacting to the violence that night in Guerrero in real time, indicating they could have key insight into the massacre.
"It's hard to say from the outside what has been done in regards to these messages because there has been no concrete evidence to date that there has been a serious, thorough and developed investigation into what kinds of evidence these intercepts could provide," said Claire Dorfman, assistant director of the National Security Archive's Mexico Documentation Project.
She said the lack of thorough investigation is an example of prosecutorial tunnel vision.
"This case - and the Chicago side of this case - are an example of how drug prosecutions continue to trump human rights concerns," she said.
"After 11 years, with this case being so paradigmatic and so internationally recognized as a very serious and grave violation of human rights, if the human rights concerns can't trump the drug prosecutions then how can they ever?" said Dorfman. "If protecting human rights and having accountability and having justice be a priority aren't considered prosecutable even in a case like this, then I don't know when they ever could be."
Source: Courthouse News Service
