The Ayotzinapa Agenda
June 3, 2016
The Ayotzinapa Agenda
by Laura Carlsen
The five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts filed onto the makeshift stage and took their seats before some 1,000 people.
The audience anxiously awaited the second and final report of the group charged by the Organization of American States to investigate Mexico’s high-profile case of the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa. Three hours later, their findings had established a pattern of obstruction, manipulation and lies by the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto1
The Mexican public has closely followed the experts’ investigation, depositing in them the hopes for truth and justice that few believed would be fulfilled by the official investigation. The professional commitment and qualifications of the group—former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, Chilean jurist Francisco Cox, Colombian lawyer and criminologist Angela Buitrago, Spanish psychologist Carlos Beristain and Colombian human rights lawyer Alejandro Valencia—opened up the possibility that for once a crime of the state would not be erased from Mexico’s selective memory.
The final report on one year and two months of work brought few real surprises. The first report, presented in September, caused a stir across the globe by documenting in 560 pages an unprecedented amount of hard information—unusual in a Mexican political case. Buitrago began the presentation of the second report stating that “there is no change in the facts to those that we presented in the previous report, and on the contrary, new evidence confirmed those findings…”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/the-ayotzinapa-agenda/