MEXICO CITY (AP) – New evidence by a collaborating witness directly implicates Mexico’s military in the disappearance of 43 college students in a 2014 incident that is still haunting the country, according to a newspaper report Wednesday.
According to the newspaper Reforma, the witness, presumably a gang member identified only as ‘Juan’, claimed soldiers detained and interrogated some of the students before handing them over to a drug gang.
The students’ bodies were then burned at a local crematorium or dissolved in acidic or corrosive solutions and dumped into drains, the witness said. Still other bodies were allegedly hacked and scattered near the city of Taxco.
The revelation could further embarrass the military, which was recently hit by allegations that a former secretary of defense was in the pay of a drug gang. It may also imply that most of the students’ remains can never be found.
The Department of Home Affairs confirmed that the evidence was part of the case and said it would file complaints against whoever it leaked. The department did not comment on the accuracy of the newspaper’s version of the evidence.
But a person familiar with the case said the evidence was new from early 2020 and was part of the case.
The witness said an army captain, who is now on trial on charges of organized crime, detained and interrogated some of the students at a local army base before handing them over to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang.
Police detained another group, and gang members caught others. In total, the witness said up to 70 to 80 people were detained, surrendered to the gang and killed because the Guerreros Unidos gang believed criminals from a rival group were among them.
The accusation is one of a series of conflicting testimonies that presented different versions of what happened to the students of a rural teachers’ college who hijacked buses when they were rounded up by the police and handed over to a drug gang.
After more than six years of investigation, Mexican authorities found dozens of clandestine graves and 184 bodies, but none of the missing students.
According to initial investigations into the events in September 2014, police in the city of Iguala handed over the students to cartel members, who allegedly killed and burned them. Charred bone fragments, however, were linked only to two students.
Witness ‘Juan’ allegedly told investigators that bone fragments found around a garbage dump near Iguala were planted by the drug gang to investigate.
Prosecutors once claimed that the students were burned in a large pile of fire at the landfill, a version that was later told by independent forensic experts that it was not feasible.
‘Juan’ said some of the student’s bodies were in fact dissolved in corrosive solutions and dumped in the drains, while others were hacked and burned at a local funeral home.
An employee at the funeral home in Iguala, known as ‘El Angel’, confirmed that he did have crematorium facilities. It would have been a bold move that implied the drug gang’s almost total control in Iguala, as the funeral home is also the base for the local medical investigators’ office.
However, there was conflicting evidence in the case, including some that were allegedly withdrawn under torture by investigators in a previous government.