MEXICO has ordered the arrest of military personnel suspected of involvement in the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a teacher’s college in the state of Guerrero, an unresolved case that has drawn international condemnation.

The arrest warrants were announced by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador yesterday as he presented a report on how the lengthy investigation was proceeding into a tragedy that remains an open sore for Mexico.

“Orders have been issued for the arrest of the military personnel,” Lopez Obrador said at an event with parents of the missing students.

“Zero impunity – those proven to have participated will be judged,” he added.

The president did not detail any charges against the suspects.

The disappearance in 2014 sent shockwaves around Mexico.

The students had commandeered five buses to travel to a protest, but were stopped by corrupt police in the city of Iguala, Guerrero and handed over to a drug cartel.

Prosecutors initially said the cartel mistook the students for members of a rival gang and killed them before incinerating their bodies at a garbage dump and tossing the remains in a river.

An official report presented in January 2015 by the government of then president Enrique Pena Nieto was rejected as faulty by relatives of the students as well as independent experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Families of the victims have continued to demand answers, and have long complained that the military did nothing to protect the students and may even have been accomplices in the crime. – AFP, September 27, 2020.