Breathe
By Itxaro Arteta*
Nine years after the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School in Iguala, Guerrero, the Mexican State is only looking for 39 of the 43. At least in terms of official records, those that the current government wants to purge before the end of the six-year term.
We are referring to the National Register of Missing and Unaccounted for Persons (RNPDNO), whose public version in open data format was only published in August of this year, after families and civil society involved in the issue requested it during the entire six-year term, since what was available was only a digital interface to consult some data through filters.
At Data Cívica we searched that database for the names of the 43 students and found only 39.
Three of those missing correspond to those who the Attorney General's Office (FGR) has said have already been identified by the University of Innsbruck among the human remains found in Cocula, a municipality neighboring Iguala. Alexander Mora Venancio was the first to be identified, three months after the disappearance. The names of Alfonso Rodriguez Telumbre and Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, whose remains were also identified months later and confirmed by the same university in 2020 and 2021, do not appear in the RNPDNO.
Also missing is the name of a student for whom no identification has been reported: José Ángel Campos Cantor.
According to the General Law on Forced Disappearance of Persons and Disappearance Committed by Private Individuals, when people are found their names must be removed from the Register. We can assume that three normalistas are considered to have been found dead, despite the fact that at first their parents questioned the finding of remains in Cocula as part of the "historical truth" of what had happened, an explanation for which the then Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam is now in jail and which the families have just claimed to the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who seems to be validating it more and more.
This case, which is perhaps the most emblematic of disappearances in a country that accumulates more than 111 thousand people whose whereabouts are unknown, 75 thousand of them in the last decade, and 295 thousand who have ever been reported as missing, and serves as an example of what happens in the absence of transparency and methodological clarity in the records, which leave more doubts than certainties.
It is also possible that the magnitude of the number of missing persons is greater than what is registered in the RNPDNO. Based on the National Survey of Victimization and Perception of Public Security (ENVIPE), which since 2013 asks citizens whether during the previous year any of their members were victims of a disappearance "forcibly or against their will, by the action of an authority or a criminal group", we estimate at least 395 thousand disappearances in the last 11 years (regardless of whether the persons were subsequently found, alive or dead).
This crisis has led to claims even outside of Mexico: between September 13 and 15, the Mexican State held follow-up meetings with the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED). Among its recommendations, the Committee had pointed out that registries are important "to establish efficient strategies for the search, investigation, attention to victims and eradication of this scourge. Registers should also make an essential contribution to the prevention of disappearances.
However, the response of Mexican officials was to say that they are implementing what they call a new "census" of missing persons, in reality, "a process of verification of the status" of these people, as stated by the permanent representative of Mexico to the International Organizations in Geneva, Francisca Méndez Escobar.
The CED rapporteur, Horacio Ravenna, replied that this review of the Register leaves doubts and was blunt about the functioning of the various mechanisms that Mexico is implementing to resolve the crisis of disappearances: "the efforts are not producing results".
But days later, back on the issue of the Ayotzinapa normalistas, it became clear that for the government there is no truth other than what President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says. The fathers and mothers of the young people met with him to demand that the Army really transparent all the information it has from that early morning of September 26-27, 2014, since the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) investigating the case left the country last July denouncing the impossibility of clarifying what happened if all the information is not handed over.
The response was the official denial, on the one hand, that there are hidden files. And on the other hand, the promise of a new release of all the information, but directly to the families of the normalistas and not to human rights organizations or external investigators.
López Obrador once again replicates his logic of avoiding intermediaries, as he did from the beginning of his government with the delivery of social programs. Although once again, this direct contact will not imply solutions, since it is not the parents who should carry out a conclusive investigation, contrasted with the official versions and that, finally, will lead to the truth and justice that they have asked for so much.
*Strategic Communications Leader of Data Cívica. Journalist with experience in gender, human rights, transparency and politics, has published in media such as Animal Político, El País and Reforma. Finalist of the Breach-Valdez Award for Journalism and Human Rights 2022, honorable mention of the Faces for Equality Award 2023. She holds a degree in Communication from UNAM, a Master's degree in Journalism from El País-Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and a diploma in Investigative Journalism from CIDE.
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