A former Colombian prosecutor, Angela Buitrago, said the team of independent experts had found evidence that authorities had concealed or falsified information from the beginning of the investigation. “He was abducted from day one until the last day,” said Buitrago, a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which supports the investigation. Buitrago said investigators, prosecutors and military personnel changed crime scenes and records. A video of a government drone taken by experts showed marines and police climbing around the area where students were allegedly killed with minimal control. The students of a radical college of teachers were abducted by the local police in the southern state of Guerrero, who probably killed them and burned their bodies. But the students were under surveillance because their college, which has strong ties to left-wing social movements in Mexico, was seen as a hotbed of expertise. “Security authorities had two intelligence processes in progress, one to monitor organized crime in the area and the other to locate students,” the researchers said in the report, which was based on declassified documents. Following the abduction, investigators sought to quickly resolve the crime through illegal investigations, detentions and the torture of suspects. Mexico has asked the Israeli government to extradite a former top security official, Tomás Zerón, who was head of the federal investigation service at the time of the abduction. He is wanted on charges of torturing and covering up these disappearances. Zerón, who fled to Israel in August 2019, oversaw the criminal investigation service of the attorney general’s office and also her forensic work in the 2014 case. Most of the students’ bodies have never been found, although burnt to pieces bones have matched three students. The investigation has long been criticized by the families of the 43 students who went missing in September 2014 after being arrested by local police in Iguala, Guerrero. They reportedly surrendered to a drug gang and were killed, and has not been heard from since. Zerón was at the center of an investigation widely criticized by the government, which failed to determine definitively what happened to the students. Two independent teams of experts have questioned the insistence of Mexican officials that the students’ bodies were cremated in a huge fire in a garbage dump. Many of the suspects arrested in the case were later released and many claimed to have been tortured by police or the army.
