NewsLatin AmericaLopez Obrador on the Ayotzinapa case: “Prosecuting Pena Nieto is going to be difficult”

Lopez Obrador on the Ayotzinapa case: “Prosecuting Pena Nieto is going to be difficult”

The President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, during the morning press conference on August 22, 2022.Isaac Esquivel (EFE)

The discussion around the Ayotzinapa case continues, after days of many news, with the arrest of the former prosecutor, Jesus Murillo Karam, dominating the scene. On Friday, the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) announced the capture of Murillo, who was in charge of investigating the case in the first stage. The unit accuses him of forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice. This Monday, the president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has referred to the matter. “He blames himself, according to the report and investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office.”

It is the first time these days that the president refers to the matter. In his morning press conference, reporters have also asked him about President Enrique Pena Nieto (2012-2018), Murillo’s hierarchical superior. Then, the Prosecutor’s Office depended on the executive power. “The judge will decide. It is difficult for it to happen, but we cannot advance any judgment. That must be resolved by the judge, ”he said. Also asked by Salvador Cienfuegos, Secretary of National Defense during Pena Nieto’s six-year term, Lopez Obrador has ruled out that he is one of the main objectives of the investigation.

Lopez Obrador has based his statements on the report that the presidential commission that has followed the case these years published last Thursday. In the presentation of the document, the Undersecretary for Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, described the attack against the normalista students, which occurred almost eight years ago, as a State crime. According to the report, a conspiracy of criminals and municipal police from the municipalities of Iguala, Cocula, Huitzuco and Tepecoacuilco, in Guerrero, attacked the students and disappeared 43. Everything, in the eyes of the military and other authorities, who did nothing to prevent the attack. Later, the criminals killed the boys and distributed their remains in different places in the region.

The report put an end to the “historical truth”, a name that Murillo Karam himself gave to the investigation carried out by the Prosecutor’s Office in the years of Pena Nieto, today marked as crudely staged. According to that version, the criminals killed and burned the 43 in a garbage dump and then threw their remains into a nearby river. The commission and the current administration of the Prosecutor’s Office point out that his predecessors tortured detainees and manipulated evidence to build that story. Hence the accusation against Murillo, head of the investigations at the time.

Lopez Obrador has insisted on the self-incrimination of the former prosecutor. He has even requested that a video be played in which the current head of the FGR, Alejandro Gertz, points out the incrimination of Murillo. In the video, recorded at the presentation of one of the reports on the Ayotzinapa case, Gertz says: “The federal Executive at that time tried to avoid the responsibility of the Mexican state in the face of a disproportionate crime. And he tried to assign total guilt to the authorities of the State of Guerrero and the municipal authorities. But the dynamic of what had happened, which was impossible to hide, was out of his control. It was at that moment when the Attorney General of the Republic, Jesus Murillo, appeared before the media and stated: ‘We are preparing an investigation. The head of the security agency and his servant, who will be directly responsible for this investigation, will be transferred. Faced with this affirmation, we have now been able to demonstrate, with evidence already prosecuted, that the evident purpose of those who had assumed such a commitment was to deceive the population, to cover up what happened and evade responsibility from colluded federal and local authorities, attributing the brutality that occurred only to local police officers from Iguala, Cocula and Huitzuco, who handed over the massacred students to one of the cartels that was fighting for drug control.”

Gertz’s video continues: “To achieve the above, those who were responsible for that investigation committed an incalculable number of abuses, torture or pressure, to obtain the confessions of said police officers, assigning them all the responsibility that their superiors were trying to avoid. , to later invent the supposed historical truth”.

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Source: EL PAIS

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