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MEXICO CITY – Mexican authorities arrested the country’s former attorney general on Friday and charged him with torture and enforced disappearance in the 2014 mass kidnapping of 43 students, as the government made its boldest move yet to resolve one of the country’s most serious human rights scandals. last decades
The arrest surprised Mexicans, after eight years of slow investigations and what investigators have described as a cover-up under the previous president, Enrique Peña Nieto. On Thursday, the government official in the case, Alejandro Encinas, called the disappearances a “state crime” involving police, armed forces and civil officials, as well as a drug gang based in Guerrero state .
Dozens of people have been arrested in the case, including police and suspected gang members, and many were later released due to a lack of evidence or indications that they had been tortured. But Jesús Murillo Karam, the former attorney general arrested on Friday, was the highest-ranking ex-official charged. Historically, top Mexican politicians have enjoyed impunity, although allegations of corruption have swirled around the government.
Murillo Karam did not immediately issue a statement and his lawyer could not be reached.
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The arrest “is a clear indication of the interest of the National Prosecutor’s Office to fully investigate the obstruction of justice and human rights violations that occurred” in the case “and to hold officials at all levels accountable for their illegal actions,” said Maureen Meyer, vice chancellor. president of programs in the Washington Office for Latin America.
Still, some analysts questioned whether Mexico’s weak and ineffective justice system could win convictions in the complex crime. Alejandro Hope, a security analyst, tweeted that the case could become “a long back-and-forth, where both sides end up litigating the investigation and nothing resembling justice ever happens.”
The 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ school were last seen in the hands of local police in the southern city of Igualada on September 26, 2014. The students had commandeered several buses to go to a rally of protest, following a local custom. But that night, police and other gunmen attacked the vehicles. Murillo Karam, who was in charge of the initial investigation, said in 2015 that police handed the students over to a drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, who burned their bodies in a landfill in the nearby city of Cocula.
International legal and forensic experts have questioned this narrative, as well as the attorney general and a truth and justice commission created by the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Encinas said Thursday that the students likely inadvertently stole a bus full of drugs or money that was part of the gang’s courier system to ship narcotics into the United States. The military and federal and state police took no action to stop the mass kidnapping, he said, even though they were aware of it thanks to surveillance systems and an army spy who had infiltrated the group. ‘students
“Federal and state authorities at the highest levels were indifferent and negligent,” said Encinas, the undersecretary for Human Rights, in his press conference Thursday. His comments suggested that authorities may be willing to confront powerful individuals and institutions involved in the attack or cover-up, such as the military. He said, however, that there was no evidence pointing to Peña Nieto’s involvement.
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The Ayotzinapa case generated worldwide condemnation and sparked massive protests in Mexico. He focused attention on the growing crisis of the missing, whose number has soared to more than 100,000. Most have disappeared since President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug cartels in 2006. The military, criminal gangs and corrupt security officials working for the traffickers have played a role, authorities say.
Murillo Karam, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, was arrested Friday outside his home without resistance, authorities said.
López Obrador took office promising to solve the case, but there have been no convictions. The remains of three of the students have been found and identified, and Encinas said the others are believed to be dead.
Gabriela Martinez and Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul in Mexico City contributed to this report.