The New York Times reports: “A federal court in Mexico ordered the government on Monday to investigate the 2014 disappearances of 43 college students again, but this time under the supervision of a truth commission to be led by the nation’s top human rights body and parents of the victims.”

JOHN GIBLER, john.gibler at gmail.com
Gibler is the author of  I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa and Torn from the World: A Guerrilla’s Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico. He has been published in California Sunday Magazine and featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

He said today: “Last Monday, June 4, a Mexican federal court invalidated the government’s investigation of the attacks against the students of Ayotzinapa, citing evidence that the detained made false confessions under torture. The ruling also noted the government’s failure to investigate the participation of the federal police and the Army in the attacks. The court ordered the government to form an independent truth commission and to restart the investigation within a period of ten days.

“This recent court ruling supports what the families of the disappeared students as well as independent journalists and human rights investigators have been arguing and documenting for years: That the federal government has been orchestrating a massive ‘cover-up’ operation based on torture, lies, the destruction of evidence and the planting of false evidence. …

“In addition to truly investigating the intellectual and material authors of the attacks against the students in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26-27, 2014, it remains essential to fully investigate the command structure and participants in the federal ‘cover-up’ that has been ongoing since the first moments after the violence in the streets. In cases of forced disappearance involving state actors, a ‘cover up’ is never a secondary, external operation, but instead an essential, constitutive part of the atrocity itself.”

Gibler’s past books include Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt and To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War.