A judge in Mexico has ordered the army to provide the government with a set of internal documents that could prove critical in the investigation of the disappearance of 43 students in the country in 2014. The order was given despite the army’s claims that the documents did not exist.
According to a court order issued on Feb. 19 but obtained by Reuters on Wednesday, the army’s 853 pages of internal documents produced by the army’s intelligence agency, the Defence Ministry’s Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (CISI), have to be handed over to the judicial authorities.
The order was issued despite the Defence Ministry’s claims that the documents did not exist.
The judge’s ruling emphasized that “these files may not be considered classified information, considering the overriding interest on the part of the victims’ families, as well as society in general, to know the truth.”
The judge pointed to “the right to information regarding what happened to the missing students and the judicial process.”
The ruling was a rare rebuke of the military’s handling of information regarding one of Mexico’s most notorious human rights crimes.
The 43 student teachers disappeared in southern Mexico in late September 2014 after being intercepted by local police in the town of Iguala in Guerrero State.
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The students were allegedly handed over to a drug gang and killed, but what really happened to them has never been fully determined.
The bodies of only three students have been identified in the years since their disappearance, but what happened to the other 40 students has never been known.
The families of the missing students and their legal representatives hailed the court’s decision as a breakthrough in the case that has been surrounded by controversy, contradictions, and allegations of obstruction of justice by military institutions.
“This ruling recognizes the right to the truth of the families and of society as a whole, underlining the obligation of SEDENA [the Defence Ministry] and other military bodies to provide key information for the search for the students,” said the Agustín Pro Human Rights Centre, commonly referred to as Centro Pro, which represents the families in the court case.
The ruling came in response to an appeal, also called an amparo in Mexican law, filed by the families of the students after Defence Ministry officials refused to verify the existence of other intelligence reports or to deliver them.
The Defence Ministry’s response to the amparo plea was that it did not have any other records besides those it already turned over to the prosecutors.
According to his ruling, the judge said that such a claim was not credible and that there were reasonable grounds to believe that these missing pages existed.
The court has ordered the Defence Ministry to carry out an exhaustive search for these documents and deliver them to the court registry within a specified period.
There was no information on what these missing pages contained or why they were believed to exist.
Officials at the Defence Ministry were not available to make comments on this court ruling.
In earlier statements, the ministry said it has fully complied with the investigation and has given all relevant information it has on the case.
During a morning press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum said that she was not aware of this court ruling and that she would meet with the parents of the missing students later this month.
She did not say what they would discuss or if they would intervene in this legal dispute over these documents.
The disappearance of 43 students, all of whom were enrolled at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, has loomed over successive Mexican governments.
After the students’ disappearance following an apparent attack by local police in the city of Iguala, federal prosecutors concluded that a local drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, received the students and killed them before burning their bodies at a local dump.
This narrative, dubbed “historical truth,” was presented by the former President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government in January 2015.
However, it has since been discredited by an independent investigation by a United Nations-backed group and experts, who found major flaws with the government’s narrative and possible manipulation of evidence.
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In 2022, the new government of Mexico, led by President Obrador, promised to cooperate with the new inquiry into the disappearance of the students, which promised to be transparent.
The special prosecutor’s office, which was tasked with investigating the disappearance of the students, stated that they were working on determining whether the federal forces, including the army, had any part to play in the disappearance of the students.
It was not immediately clear how many pages of documents the ministry has already turned over or how long it will take to search and transfer the documents.
Legal experts have said the next steps in the case could involve attempts by government lawyers to limit access to the documents or to define the scope of permissible access.