Inquiry on missing Mexican students marred by politics

MEXICO CITY — It has been a tumultuous final week for the five foreign legal and human rights experts who have spent more than a year examining the case of 43 missing college students.

It began last Sunday when the independent panel issued its second voluminous report on the case, which raised further questions about the government’s handling of the matter and challenged the authorities’ conclusions. What followed were a series of dueling news conferences by the panelists and by government officials, each accusing the other of playing with the truth and bringing the relationship between the government and the experts to a low ebb.

But by Friday, with the panel’s mandate about to end and the experts preparing to leave the country, the tone had shifted again.

“Now that we leave, it seems like everybody likes us,” said Francisco Cox, a Chilean lawyer and panel member. “They express gratefulness.” He added, perhaps mindful of the frustrations accompanying the panel’s work in recent months, “We have to see if that’s real.”

Many in Mexico question the sincerity of the government’s gratitude, and they fear that with the panel’s departure, the country is losing its best chance of finding out the truth about the students’ disappearance.

The 43 students, undergraduates from a teachers college in Ayotzinapa, in the violent Pacific coast state of Guerrero, disappeared one night in September 2014 amid violent confrontations with Mexican security forces in the city of Iguala. The remains of only one student have been found.

The Mexican government, under pressure from the students’ relatives, invited the foreign experts to examine the case. The panel — five lawyers and human rights experts from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain — began its work in March 2015.

The relationship between the panel and the government, which started well, became more complicated and tense in September when the investigators issued their first report, which found significant problems with the government’s investigation.

But the relationship took a bitter turn last week.

The dispute focused on the events of Oct. 28-29, 2014, near the town of Cocula. The government has maintained that the students were murdered and incinerated by a drug gang and that their remains were dumped in the river. But the foreign experts have said the available evidence does not support those conclusions. In the panel’s second report and in an accompanying news conference last Sunday, the experts questioned the propriety of a visit by investigators to the riverbank in October 2014, saying they apparently violated international investigative protocols.

The experts screened video clips at the news conference showing Tomás Zerón, chief of criminal investigations for Mexico’s attorney general, accompanying a detained suspect to the scene on Oct. 28, 2014. The videos showed an investigator handling a bone fragment that was discarded after officials determined it was from a bird.

The videos also showed plastic bags that resembled one recovered from the river the next day by investigators and contained incinerated bones, including one that provided the only known DNA link to one of the missing students.

Yet none of that day’s investigative activities were recorded in the case file, the foreign panelists said, suggesting, at best, poor detective work and, at worst, the manipulation or planting of evidence.