Mexico City : The families of Mexico’s 43 missing students are seeking the suspension of powers of the government of Guerrero state where the disappearances occurred because of infiltration by organised crime.
The suspension of powers was requested in a document submitted to Senate representatives at a meeting Tuesday at which the families also asked the legislative body to join in the search for the students.
At the meeting between the families and political representatives in the Senate, Vidulfo Rosales, legal counsel for the families, presented their demands, the most important of which was that the students be returned alive.
The parents are seeking what they termed as impartial justice and exemplary punishment for all of those responsible for the incidents that took place Sep 26 in the town of Iguala in Guerrero state.
According to investigations, that evening local police attacked students from a teachers training institute on the orders of the then mayor Jose Luis Abarca, killing six people and injuring 25.
Investigations by the Public Prosecutor’s Office (PGR) indicate that the police seized the 43 students and handed them over to members of the Guerreros Unidos crime cartel, who killed them and burned their bodies at a landfill site in neighbouring Cocula.
The PGR reported Sunday that a DNA sample from one of the bones found at a garbage dump matched with that of one of the disappeared students, Alexander Mora Venancio.
In their petition to the Senate, the families also called for experts from the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights to visit Guerrero to speed up the investigations and for the government to ratify the competence of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances.
They also demanded the suspension of powers of the state government at Guerrero on account of the infiltration by organised crime of municipal bodies, and the suspension of state elections scheduled for 2015.
“One cannot have elections when there are 42 people missing because the authorities should be looking for them,” they said.
They also called upon the senators to pressure the PGR into opening more channels of investigation and not be satisfied with the landfill-site “hypothesis”.
“To accept this hypothesis would mean turning the students to ash,” said Rosales. “There are elementary proofs indicating that not everyone suffered the same fate as Alexander, and that they could be found alive at some other place.”