An investigative report published Sunday by the Mexican magazine Proceso accuses Mexican authorities of beating and torturing municipal police officers in an effort to force confessions in the case of the missing 43 students whose disappearances have led to mass protests across the country.
Based on documents obtained from Mexico’s office of the attorney general and interviews with the police officers’ families, the article, by journalists Anabel Hernández and Steve Fisher, casts doubts on the state’s official explanation for what happened to the missing students, and suggests that the use of torture may have compromised the prosecution.
Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general, said on Nov. 7 that the mayor of the town of Iguala, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, ordered local police to attack a group of students traveling from the nearby town of Ayotzinapa on Sept. 26 to keep them from disrupting a political event for his wife. Municipal police then handed the students over to members of a criminal gang called Guerreros Unidos, who killed the students and burned their bodies, according to Murillo Karam.
But Hernández and Fisher’s article says that according to medical reports obtained by the journalists, more than two dozen municipal police officers from the towns of Iguala and Cocula were beaten, given electric shocks and “psychologically tortured” in an effort to force confessions from them. The Proceso report names 20-year-old David Hernández Cruz, one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, among the officers who were allegedly abused.
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Last week, Murillo Karam said the government had definitively concluded that the students were dead.
“The evidence allows us to determine that the students were kidnapped, killed, burned and thrown into the river,” Murillo Karam said last week at a press conference.
Family members, however, remain distrustful of the Mexican government’s account.
“What the government wants to do is close the case,” Epifanio Alvarez, the father of one of the missing students, said Tuesday at a press conference following the government’s announcement, according to The Guardian. “We cannot accept any of what was said because we do not have enough evidence… The government has stamped on our dignity and destroyed us.”
