Former Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam holds a news conference in Mexico City on December 7, 2014. The Mexican Attorney General’s office reported on Friday that it has arrested Murillo Karam, the person in charge. The investigation into the disappearance of 43 student teachers occurred in southern Mexico in 2014.
Marco Ugarte / AP
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Marco Ugarte / AP
Former Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam holds a news conference in Mexico City on December 7, 2014. The Mexican Attorney General’s office reported on Friday that it has arrested Murillo Karam, the person in charge. The investigation into the disappearance of 43 student teachers occurred in southern Mexico in 2014.
Marco Ugarte / AP
MEXICO CITY – Federal prosecutors on Friday said they had arrested the attorney general during Mexico’s previous administration on allegations he engaged in abusive behavior during the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students. student from a radical teachers’ college.
Prosecutors also announced they had issued arrest warrants in the case for 20 military officers, five local officials, 33 local and 11 state police, as well as 14 gang members.
The round includes the first arrest of a former attorney general in recent history and one of the largest-ever mass arrests by civilian prosecutors of Mexican military soldiers. .
Jesús Murillo Karam was attorney general from 2012 to 2015, under President Enrique Peña Nieto. The office of the current attorney general, Alejandro Gertz Manero, said Murillo Karam has been charged with torture, official misconduct and forced disappearance.
In 2020, Gertz Manero said Murillo Karam had been implicated in “staging a major media ploy” and leading a “generic cover-up” in the case.
The arrest comes a day after a commission set up to determine what happened said the military was at least partly responsible for the incident. It said a soldier had infiltrated the group of students involved and that the military did not stop the kidnappings even though they knew what was going on.
Corrupt local police, other security forces and members of a drug cartel kidnapped the students in the city of Iguala in Guerrero state, though the motives are still unclear eight years later. Their bodies were never found, although burned bone fragments were matched to three of the students.
Murillo Karam, under pressure to quickly solve the case, announced in 2014 that the students had been killed and their bodies burned at a landfill by members of a drug cartel. He called that hypothesis “historical truth”.
But the investigation that included cases of torture, improper arrest and mishandling of evidence allowed most of the gang members directly involved to go free.
The incident happened near a major military base, and independent investigations have found that members of the military were aware of what was happening. The student’s family has long demanded that soldiers be included in the investigation.
A woman carries a banner that reads in Spanish “We’re missing 43,” referring to the 43 missing students from a rural teachers’ college during a march in Mexico City on May 26. November 2015.
Eduardo Verdugo / AP
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Eduardo Verdugo / AP
A woman carries a banner that reads in Spanish “We’re missing 43,” referring to the 43 missing students from a rural teachers’ college during a march in Mexico City on May 26. November 2015.
Eduardo Verdugo / AP
On Thursday, the truth committee investigating the incident said one of the abducted students was a soldier who had infiltrated the radical teachers’ college, but the military was not looking for him despite information. real-time news that the kidnapping has happened. It said the inaction violated the military’s regulations for missing service members.
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The soldiers and officers being sought on Friday’s orders – and other officials, police and gang members – face charges of murder, torture and official misconduct , link criminals and forced to disappear
It is not yet clear whether all suspects will face all charges or if the suspects are among dozens of previous arrests and charges in previous investigations. .
Before reforms in Mexican law, the military had long been allowed to refer soldiers accused of wrongdoing to separate military courts. But soldiers must now be tried in civilian courts, if their offenses involve civilians.
The soldiers are accused of serving at the base near the site of the 2014 kidnapping.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, to which both Murillo Karam and Peña Nieto belong, wrote on its Twitter account that Murillo Karam’s arrest “is more a question of politics than justice. This action does not help the family. the victim has the answer.”
Mexican federal prosecutors had previously issued arrest warrants for members of the military and federal police as well as Tomás Zeron, who at the time of the kidnapping was the head of the federal investigative agency, the detective agency. of Mexico.
Zeron is being sought on charges of torture and a cover-up of a forced disappearance. He fled to Israel and Mexico asked the Israeli government for help in arresting him.
Gertz Manero said that in addition to Zeron’s alleged crimes related to the case, he is also alleged to have stolen more than $44 million from the budget of the Attorney General’s Office.
The motive of the student abduction remains a subject of debate.
On September 26, 2014, local police from Iguala, members of organized crime and the authorities kidnapped 43 students from the bus. The students periodically command the bus for commuting.
Murillo Karam claims the students were handed over to a drug gang that killed them, burned their bodies at a dump in nearby Cocula and threw their burned bones into the river.
Subsequent investigations by independent experts and the Attorney General’s Office, and corroborated by the facts committee, refuted the idea that the bodies were incinerated at the Cocula landfill.
There is no evidence that any of the students may still be alive.
