Editorial: A Truth That Keeps Collapsing in Ayotzinapa

The more details are known about the investigation on the disappearance of the 43 Mexican students one year ago in Ayotzinapa, the more surprising is the cheekiness with which former Mexican prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam tried to close the case. He pompously declared that the “historical truth” had been established, when everything points to a colossal lie without historical precedence.

According to the official narrative the students fell in the hands of drug traffickers of the criminal organization Guerreros Unidos, who killed them, burned their remains in a landfill and dispersed their ashes in a nearby river. This account was based mainly in the testimonies of four individuals, even though there are more than a hundred detainees. The official documents of the arrests of Jonathan Osorio Cortez “el Jona,” Patricio Reyes Landa “el Pato,” Salvador Reza Jacobo ”el Chava,” and Benito Vázquez Martínez, obtained by online news site Animal Político through a transparency law, reveal hard-to-believe facts and coincidences.

The official documents indicate that the four were captured on the same day, two in Guerrero and two in Morelos. The descriptions of the arrests and what comes next are practically identical. In every case, the authorities saw individuals drinking alcohol on the street, tried to arrest them upon identification, they tried to flee and, “because they were drunk, they tripped and fell on the ground.”

Each and every report indicate that the detainees injured themselves because “they were drunk,” and that they confessed “spontaneously” their membership of the cartel and their involvement in the killing and disappearance of the students.

Adding to those hard-to-believe reports, two international investigations flatly rejected the possibility that the bodies were incinerated in the Cocula landfill, further demolishing the official version.

The only possible explanation for the arrests report is the urgency to close the case. But we now see the irresponsible managing of the investigation and the dismal Los Pinos strategy, which downplayed the massacre thinking that it would soon be forgotten, like others.

The reports are a mockery of the Mexican people and a blow to the families of the disappeared. The paltry consolation is that the Ayotzinapa lie has ever shorter legs.