Six of 43 missing Mexico students were given to army: Official

Six of the 43 students “disappeared” in 2014 were allegedly kept alive in a warehouse for days then turned over to the local army commander who ordered them killed, the Mexican government official leading a Truth Commission said on Friday.

Interior undersecretary Alejandro Encinas made the shocking revelation directly tying the military to one of Mexico’s worst human rights scandals, and it came with little fanfare as he made a lengthy defence of the commission’s report released a week earlier.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador established the Truth Commission after he was elected to office in 2018.

Last week, despite declaring the abductions and disappearances a “state crime” and saying that the army watched it happen without intervening, Encinas made no mention of six students being turned over to Colonel José Rodríguez Pérez.

On Friday, Encinas said authorities were closely monitoring the students from the rural teachers’ college at Ayotzinapa from the time they left their campus through to their abduction by local police in the town of Iguala that night. A soldier who had infiltrated the school was among the abducted students, and Encinas asserted the army did not follow its own protocols and try to rescue him.

“There is also information corroborated with emergency 089 telephone calls where allegedly six of the 43 disappeared students were held during several days and alive in what they call the old warehouse and from there were turned over to the colonel,” Encinas said.

The role of the army in the disappearance

The defence department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the allegations on Friday.

The role of the army in the students’ disappearance has long been a source of tension between the families and the government.

From the beginning, there were questions about the military’s knowledge of what happened and its possible involvement. The students’ parents demanded for years that they be allowed to search the army base in Iguala. It was not until 2019 that they were given access, along with Encinas and the Truth Commission.

The commission report says the army registered an anonymous emergency call on September 30, 2014, four days after the students’ abduction.

The caller reportedly said the students were being held in a large concrete warehouse in a location described as “Pueblo Viejo.” The caller proceeded to describe the location.

That entry was followed by several pages of redacted material, but that section of the report concluded with the following: “As can be seen, obvious collusion existed between agents of the Mexican state with the criminal group Guerreros Unidos that tolerated, allowed and participated in events of violence and disappearance of the students, as well as the government’s attempt to hide the truth about the events.”

Later, in a summary of how the commission’s report differed from the original investigation’s conclusions, there is mention of a colonel.

“On September 30 ‘the colonel’ mentions that they will take care of cleaning everything up and that they had already taken charge of the six students who had remained alive,” the report said.

Parents protest

In a witness statement provided to federal investigators in December 2014, Captain José Martínez Crespo, who was stationed at the base in Iguala, said the base commander for the 27th Infantry Battalion at the time was Colonel José Rodriguez Pérez.

Through a driving rain later on Friday, the families of the 43 missing students marched in Mexico City with several hundred other people as they have on the 26th of every month for years.