Government Trying to Discredit Critical Report on Missing Students, Lawyer Says Melissa del Pozo - VICE News
go to original October 5, 2015

Mexico's Ayotzinapa Struggle Provokes Multifold Reflections (teleSUR English)

Mexico's government is releasing false information to bolster its widely-questioned conclusion that 43 student teachers were incinerated in a garbage dump after being disappeared a year ago, according to a human rights lawyer representing the missing young men's families.

Mario Patrón, director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, told VICE News he believed this is part of a strategy designed to undermine a recent report by international experts that concluded the garbage dump hypothesis is "scientifically impossible."

"They have released biased information with the purpose of strengthening their own theory," he said of the case that continues to generate anger and incredulity in Mexico and internationally. "They are trying to tarnish the work of the group of experts."

The experts were assembled by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. Their report, released in early September, was publicly accepted by President Enrique Peña Nieto who said he was sure it would help "clear up the truth of what really happened." But Patrón said the government's reluctance to embrace the report's findings is clear in its handling of the recent detention of the alleged leader of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang in the city of Iguala, where the students were disappeared on September 26 2014 after they were attacked by municipal police.

The government investigation had named Gildardo López Astudillo, alias "El Cabo Gil," as the link between Guerreros Unidos and corrupt local authorities. During the night of the attacks he is said to have given the order to murder and disappear the students.

Read the rest at VICE News

Related: Here's Why Mexico Distrusts Authorities to Find 43 Missing Students (GlobalPost)

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