MEXICO CITY (AP) — Families of the 43 students of a rural teacher kidnapped a decade ago in southern Mexico marked the painful anniversary Thursday, disillusioned after what they say was a decade of unfulfilled government promises.
The anniversary comes just four days before the departure of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose election in 2018 sparked hope among families.
His administration made some early progressestablished a Truth Commission and declared the disappearances a ‘state crime’. But when the investigation stalled without the military’s cooperation, the president closed ranks with the generals.
“He gave us a lot of hope,” said Joaquina García, mother of missing student Martín Getsemany Sánchez. “But it seems like he’s really protecting the military and that’s not fair.”
On September 26, 2014students from the Rural Normal School in Ayotzinapa went to Iguala to steal buses – a common way they obtained transportation. They were attacked by a local drug gang, who were in cahoots with local, state and federal authorities.
Two administrations later, many details about what happened to the students and especially where they are remain unknown. They are among the more than 115,000 registered missing people in Mexico.
“Ten years of suffering, ten years of pain, not having a son is not easy,” García said Thursday during an event at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Here we cry to see if the people who took our children will find it in their hearts.”
About 120 people are stuck. Mexico’s former attorney general has been accused of making up a false story about what happened.
López Obrador had promised to solve the mystery. But on Wednesday he downplayed, downplayed and even opposed his own government’s findings, claiming that those trying to connect the military are driven by “political interests.”
The United Nations Human Rights Office complained in a statement on Thursday about the authorities’ “unsatisfactory results”. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which sent experts to Mexico for eight years to assist in the investigation, said in a statement it was concerned that the investigation had stalled and denounced a “pact of silence that has prevented the identification of the perpetrators and those who cover them.”
The parents and students at the teacher training college planned to march through the Mexican capital Thursday afternoon, as they have done every month on the 26th for the past decade.
“This fight is not over yet,” García said.
