![Final Report of the GIEI mexico-missing-students-report](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/guerrero-mexico-missing-students.jpg?quality=85&w=2400)
On the stormy night of Sept. 26, 2014, police from the Mexican city of Iguala pursued a bus full of student teachers, firing shots until it was forced to a halt. The officers then smashed the bus windows with batons and stones and threw in tear-gas canisters to force the students out. When they had them face down and in cuffs, an officer said the detainees wouldn’t fit in the patrol cars. His companion said not to worry, as more police were coming from the nearby city of Huitzuco. Minutes later, three police cars arrived and the students were loaded in — the last verified sighting of them alive.
This description of the abduction, given by the bus driver, is among the evidence examined in a new report on the Iguala attacks released Sunday by an independent group of experts, who had been appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The 608-page document raises crucial questions about the fate of the students in what has become the most high-profile crime in Mexico in recent years. On that night, a total of 43 students disappeared after traveling on several buses, and another six students and passersby were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand justice following the attacks. Under pressure, the Mexican government agreed to work with the independent experts on the investigation.
The experts’ report, the second they have released, pokes various holes in the government’s case. In 2014, the Mexican attorney general claimed that corrupt police handed students to assassins from a heroin cartel called Guerreros Unidos, or Warriors United. The cartel burned all the missing students at a garbage dump near a town called Cocula, he said. However, the experts argue that evidence shows a fire of the size needed to burn 43 bodies never happened there.
Families of the students have long rejected the attorney general’s account and called on the government to keep searching for the students in other places, including in Huitzuco. More recently, federal investigators have changed their line to say that only some of the students may have been burned at the Cocula dump.
The problems in the investigation have become a central focus of criticism for President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose approval ratings fell to a new low of 30% this month. “For Mexico’s civil society, the case of Iguala has become symbolic of the larger failures in Mexico’s justice system,” says Raul Benitez-Manaut, who heads a think tank on security issues. “In the Iguala investigation, there are cases of torturing of suspects and the mishandling of evidence. These are problems we see everyday in Mexico. The government is failing to confront these issues.”
Confronting Mexico’s Latest Cruel Massacre
![People rally on the streets of México City on November 5, 2014 demanding an explanation from the government for what happened to the 43 students that went missing on September 26, 2014. The students attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural teachers college of Ayotzinapa in Iguala Guerrero.Allegedly corrupt police in Iguala worked for the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which authorities charge had ties to the former mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc3289.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Portraits of the missing students inChinpalcingo Zocalo (Main Square) while awoman sells ballons for the Dia de losMuertos.Chilpancingo de los Bravo is the capital ofGuerrero State and is located just 14 kmfrom the Raul Isidro Burgos de AyotzinapaCollege, the school the missing students attended. This city is the head of thedemonstrations against the government forthe lack of proof and responsibilities for the43 students who disappeared on September26th in Iguala, October 31, 2014Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc0533.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa TeachersCollege - Memorial of the 7 students whodied during the confrontations with theauthorities the night of on September 26th,where the 43 students were disappeared.November 1, 2014 Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc0767.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![XALTIANGUIS, MEXICO - NOVEMER 2, 2014:Patrol of Community Police of Xaltianguis. It´s one of the biggest and more important in Guerrero State. They searched for the students immediately after they disappeared on September 26th in Iguala. Since then, the community has been demonstrating and blocking the road from Mexico DF to the touristic Acapulco.Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc9646.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![XALTIANGUIS, MEXICO - NOVEMER 2, 2014:Patrol of Community Police of Xaltianguis. It´s one of the biggest and more important in Guerrero State. They searched for the students immediately after they disappeared on September 26th in Iguala. Since then, the community has been demonstrating and blocking the road from Mexico DF to the touristic Acapulco.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1212.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![XALTIANGUIS, MEXICO - NOVEMER 2, 2014:Patrol of Community Police of Xaltianguis. It´s one of the biggest and more important in Guerrero State. They searched for the students immediately after they disappeared on September 26th in Iguala. Since then, the community has been demonstrating and blocking the road from Mexico DF to the touristic Acapulco. Here the community police search cars Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1462.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![XALTIANGUIS, MEXICO - NOVEMER 2, 2014:Patrol of Community Police of Xaltianguis. It´s one of the biggest and more important in Guerrero State. They searched for the students immediately after they disappeared on September 26th in Iguala. Since then, the community has been demonstrating and blocking the road from Mexico DF to the touristic Acapulco.Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1490.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1734.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Chalk outlines representing the bodies of crime victims during a protest in Mexico City, November 5, 2014. The protestors demanded government accountability for the disappearance and alleged murder of 43 students from the rural state of Guerrero, one of the poorest in the country. Sebastian Liste—NOOR For TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc0047.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![The main cemetery in Chilpancingo, the capital and second-largest city of the state of Guerrero, Mexico. The city is on the Mexican Federal Highway 95 which connects Acapulco to Mexico City. Guerrero state, on the Pacific coast, is an important transit point for illegal shipments of cocaine and heroin arriving from South America en route to the United States, the world's largest illegal drug market. Many of the graves in the cemetery are related to drug cartel violence in the region. Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc0741.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1179.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Ayotzinapa is steeped in a radical leftisttradition, with murals of the revolutionaryChe Guevara adorning the campus.Back in the 1970s, its alumnus Lucio Cabanasled one of Mexico’s biggest guerrillacampaigns of the 20th century. More recently,students have been protesting anoverhaul of the education system by PenaNieto, which they say threatens their jobprospects. They’ve been blocking highways,angering residents, and hijackingcommercial buses to get to their marches.They usually return the vehicles but localbusinesses complain about the disruption.On Sept. 26, about 120 of Ayotzinapa’steacher trainees went to Iguala to hijackbuses to travel to Mexico City, where theyhoped to commemorate a massacre ofstudents back in 1968.11/1/2014 Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc0773.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![The 43 disappeared and allegedly killed students of Guerrero state walked into a narco snake pit on Sept. 26. They attended AyotzinapaUniversity, a rural school foundedafter the Mexican Revolution to bringliteracy to the countryside. They camemostly from poor villages in the Guerreromountains. The university itself operateson a shoestring, with students often sleepingon floors in dilapidated buildings.Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa TeachersCollege rooms where the first yearstudents slept. Currently it is used by theparents of the 43 missing students that arestaying all together at the school fightingand looking for the kids since they disappeared.](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc9339.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![The father Father of one of the studentsdisappeared during the night of September26th in Iguala, photographed November 1, 2014 photographed at the Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa TeachersCollege Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME *wanted to remain anonymous but sebastian can see if he would now agree to have his name in the caption](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1057.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
![Mother of a student at the Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa TeachersCollege. November 1, 2014Sebastian Liste—NOOR FOR TIME](https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dsc1069.jpg?quality=75&w=2400)
The new report documents signs of torture on at least 17 of the more than 100 suspects who have been arrested over the student disappearances, among them police officers and alleged cartel gunmen. While the suspects could have been involved in the crime, the torture allegations raise doubts about their testimonies. “We never defend criminals, but we also know that thanks to torture, they say what is convenient for the attorney general’s office,” Mario Gonzalez, the father of one of the missing students, said Monday following the release of the report. (The issue of torture in Mexico has been in the news following the emergence of a recent video that showed soldiers and police suffocating a suspected kidnapper with a plastic bag, prompting the nation’s defense secretary to offer a public apology.)
The report also examines the mishandling of crime scenes in the Iguala investigation. Key sites, such as the garbage dump where students were supposed to have been burned, were left unguarded. A charred bone fragment, identified though DNA to be one of the students, was found in a bag in a river near to the dump. However, the experts raise questions about the shady presence of federal officers by the river in the days before this bag was found. The parents of the disappeared students said Monday that there should be an investigation into whether evidence was moved or planted.
President Peña Nieto responded to the report with a tweet promising to take the experts’ findings into account. “The PGR_MX (Attorney General’s Office) will analyze the complete report to enrich its investigation into the tragic events of September 26 and 27, 2014,” he said Sunday. However, Mexico’s government has already said it would not renew the contracts of the experts after April.
Police have long worked with drug cartels across Mexico, exacerbating bloodshed that claims thousands of lives every year. The webs of corruption have hampered criminal cases, and the role of experts raised hopes that there could be a more open investigation into the Iguala attacks. However, Carlos Beristain, one of the experts, said Monday there is still much work to be done. “We are leaving with a bittersweet taste,” Beristain said. “The case is not closed.”
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