Mexican authorities have found the remains of one of 43 students who disappeared without trace in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, more than five years ago.
Mexican authorities have confirmed that the discovery of one of the bodies, identified as Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre on Tuesday July 7, was done with the aid of DNA testing and is a significant breakthrough in the case that has left Mexicans shocked.
On September 26, 2014, 43 students from a teacher’s college in the state of Guerrero suddenly disappeared and investigations by Enrique Peña Nieto’s former Mexican administration concluded they had been captured by police and handed over to the Guerreros Unidos criminal group.
According to the inquiry, their bodies were burned in a landfill and then dumped into a river in Cocula municipality — a theory called “the historic truth.”
But an investigation undertaken by forensic experts in Argentina debunked the theory, for years causing the students’ entire disappearance to be shrouded in mystery.
When Mexico ‘s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office, he promised to find out the truth, and then formed a commission that reopened the investigation and began from scratch.
The new discovery of the body comes from six pieces of remains, which were sent to the laboratory at the University of Innsbruck in Vienna , Austria, where they were analyzed for months, according to Mexico’s Attorney General’s office.
Contrary to the investigation carried out by the previous government, the body material, they said, was not found in the landfill or the river, but about 800 meters from it. “where the historical truth is created,” the attorney general’s office said.
“Without a doubt this marks the beginning of the new route in the investigation that not only collapsed the so-called historical truth, but also generates the conditions for the indications, the evidence, the investigations carried out to clarify the events that unfortunately happened in Ayotzinapa,” Mexico’s undersecretary of Human Rights Alejandro Encinas said.
“We have broken the pact of impunity and silence that surrounded” the case, Mr. Omar Gómez Trejo, the special prosecutor assigned to the case said at a news conference.
He added, “today we tell the families and society that the right to the truth will prevail.”
