Damning Report Claims Mexican Federal Police Participated In Disappearance Of 43 Students

*This only gets worse … smh. VL

By Roque Planas and Carolina Moreno, Huffington Post Latino Voices

Mexico’s federal police collaborated with local forces in the September attack on 43 students whose disappearance and presumed killings have led to mass protests in the country, according to an investigative report published Sunday in the Mexican magazine Proceso.

Federal authorities also likely tortured key witnesses who offered critical testimony for an investigation by the Mexican attorney general’s office into the disappearances, the lead reporter for the Proceso story told The Huffington Post.

The Proceso investigation is based on leaked government documents that are not publicly available, as well as a report by the state government of Guerrero, where the students’ college was located and where they were attacked. The magazine published an abbreviated version of its story on Saturday, as well as a newswire version on Sunday. The full investigation was published Sunday in a print version of the magazine, only available in Mexico.

Both the newswire and early version of the Proceso investigation sharply contradict the version of events put forth by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration, at a time when a widespread protest movement has questioned the government’s handling of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the missing students.

“We have information that proves the federal government knew what was happening in the moment it was happening, and participated in it,” Anabel Hernández, the lead reporter for the Proceso piece, told HuffPost in a telephone interview. “The government has tried to hide this information.”

Proceso’s story was co-authored by journalist Steve Fisher and supported by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley. The Mexican attorney general’s office and the president’s office did not immediately respond to requests from HuffPost for comment on the story.

On Sept. 26, a group of students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college in the southwestern state of Guerrero traveled to the nearby city of Iguala to take part in a protest. They were ambushed and shot at along the way by police forces, leading to three deaths and several injuries.

Several students escaped, but 43 of them disappeared — feeding a protest movement with international reach and months of speculation over the role of security forces in their presumed killings.

The federal government has maintained that the students were first attacked by local police acting on the orders of the mayor of the town of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, both of whom were detained last month. Local police, according to the government, then handed 43 of the students off to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, who killed them and disposed of their remains.

But the Guerrero state report says that federal police began watching the students from the moment they left Ayotzinapa at 5:59 p.m. on buses heading toward Iguala, Proceso said. According to the magazine’s account of the state report, both federal and state police were monitoring the students as they traveled, and federal police joined in stopping and shooting the students.

Proceso said that according to the state report, the first gunshots were reported at 9:40 p.m. to Mexico’s Center of Control, Command, Communications and Computation, or C4, a communication structure used by federal and local security forces, as well as the military. Though the C4 unit in Iguala is run by state authorities, Proceso said that both federal police and the military have access to its communications — making it impossible that the federal authorities would not have known about the attack as it was happening.

Univision.com said Saturday that Proceso’s revelations clearly contradict the federal government’s previous statements …

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This article was originally published in Huffington Post Latino Voices