With little fanfare, Mexican officials have quietly tried to undercut an international investigation into one of the country’s worst human rights tragedies: the attack on 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school, who were kidnapped and presumably killed by police and whose bodies have never been found.



At a press conference on Friday, an investigator working on a third inquiry into the case repeated the government’s claim that the students’ bodies were burned at a rubbish dump – even though two previous investigations by international experts have rejected the theory.

Forensic scientists from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IACHR) and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, a non-governmental organisation, have both ruled out the government’s version of the events: weather records show it rained on the night of the students’ disappearance, while satellite images show there were no fires at the site on the night.

But the Mexican government seems intent on maintaining its theory – described by the former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam as the “historical truth” – in an effort to close down a case that has caused international embarrassment and sent President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval rating plummeting.

“It’s a battle between the [IACHR] and the Mexican government to construct the version of events,” said Ilán Semo, a political historian at the Iberoamerican University.

The IACHR must conclude its activities in Mexico by 30 April and, according to the interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, will not receive any more renewals of its mandate.

According to Semo, the battle with the IACHR over its investigation into the 2014 Ayotzinapa attacks forms part of a broader pattern of behaviour in which the government has questioned the legitimacy of human rights activists and international organisations.

The IACHR has called it “a smear campaign”.

The Mexican government has said outside investigators such as the IACHR are welcome to work in the country and says they have received full cooperation.

But the pushback against international human rights investigators goes beyond the Ayotzinapa case. Last month, the secretariat of foreign relations denied permission for a UN special rapporteur on torture to continue his work in the country, arguing its agenda was saturated with other visiting missions.

Juan Méndez, an Argentinian, had previously incurred the wrath of the Mexican government for reporting on the widespread use of torture by the country’s security forces. A Mexican undersecretary for human rights called him “irresponsible and unethical”.

Peña Nieto has himself supported the “historic truth”, telling a military event in February that “the Mexican state has deployed a broad, institutional effort to pursue justice” in the case of the missing students.

Others have followed his lead: several pro-government newspapers published front-page stories on the government’s latest announcement, and an “anti-crime” group lodged a criminal complaint against the president of the IACHR team investigating the Ayotzinapa attack, accusing him of misuse of public money.

The Mexican attorney general’s office (PGR) subsequently opened a preliminary investigation against the IACHR’s executive secretary, Emilio Álvarez Icaza, prompting a scornful reaction from the human rights commission.

“There are thousands of disappeared persons, homicides, incidents of summary executions, executions committed by agents of the state. And from this universe of problems it decided to proceed with this preliminary investigation?” the IACHR president, James Cavallaro, told the newsweekly Proceso. The PGR abandoned the investigation.



Álvarez Icaza was more blunt, telling reporters: “Mexico is experiencing a return to authoritarianism.”

Three UN experts in human rights issued a statement on Wednesday, demanding that the Mexican government “actively counter the current stigmatisation campaign that attempts to undermine those that work as promoters of fundamental freedoms in the country”.

Semo, the political historian, said that historically, Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had resorted to similar tactics during its decades of one-party rule in the last century, in order to confuse the public and weaken the opposition.

“They are not going to confront them directly,” Semo said. “Their tactic is to say, ‘They’re inept, they don’t know how to do their jobs, they’re wasting money, they should go home because they’re not good for anything, they should send better people … It’s to confuse international public opinion.”