Manuel Vazquez Arellano counts himself lucky to have survived the mass disappearance of 43 Mexican students a decade ago. Now a lawmaker, he says he is determined to uncover the truth about what happened.
“Even if I were a priest, I would still be talking about the missing 43,” the former student leader, a member of congress with the ruling left-wing Morena party, told AFP ahead of the 10th anniversary Thursday of the tragedy.
Now 36, Vazquez Arellano said that when he was invited to become a federal legislator in 2021, he accepted on the condition “that I could say anything” about the case, which drew international condemnation.
On the night of September 26-27, 2014, Vazquez Arellano, also known as Omar Garcia, was in Iguala at the scene of the disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training college in the southern state of Guerrero.
He said he arrived after his classmates vanished.
“When the authorities didn’t come, we called the media,” he said. “When they arrived, we were shot at. Everyone ran.”
The students — from a college whose members have a history of political activism — wanted to commandeer buses to go to Mexico City and participate in the annual commemorations of the student massacre of October 2, 1968.
The college, which is free, is the only option for many students from poor families from the surrounding countryside.
It has always been considered by the authorities as a hotbed of “guerrillas,” according to Vazquez Arellano, who has been accused by some relatives of the missing of being partly responsible because he knew the activities were risky.
“We don’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. We just want him to stop talking about the missing people,” Mario Cesar Gonzalez Contreras, the father of one of the 43, told AFP.
– ‘State crime’ –
The case has become emblematic of a missing persons crisis that has seen more than 100,000 people disappear in a spiral of drug-related violence in Mexico.
So far, the remains of only three of the missing students have been identified through genetic testing of bone fragments.
Outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador created a commission after taking office in 2018 tasked with establishing the truth about the mass disappearance.
In 2022, the commission branded it a “state crime” and said the military shared responsibility, either directly or through negligence.
Investigators suspect that the students were abducted by drug traffickers in collusion with corrupt police, although exactly what happened to them is unclear.
The so-called “historical truth” — an official version of the case presented in 2015 under then president Enrique Pena Nieto — was widely rejected, notably the theory that the remains were incinerated at a garbage dump.
One theory the commission put forward was that cartel members targeted the students because they had unknowingly taken a bus with drugs hidden inside.
Vazquez Arellano believes that Lopez Obrador had “the political will” to uncover the truth and credited him with making progress during his six-year term, which will end next week.
“But until we really know what happened that night and where the students are, it won’t be enough,” he added.
Vazquez Arellano deplored “inertia” and an approach within state institutions that favored “impunity rather than justice.”
The lawmaker, who was re-elected in June, has his sights set on Omar Garcia Harfuch, a former senior police officer who has been tapped to be security minister under president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who will take office on October 1.
“You know what happened on the night of September 26 in Iguala,” Vazquez Arellano said in a video message last October. “You knew how the historical truth was constructed.”
Garcia Harfuch, a former police coordinator in Guerrero who went on to be Mexico City’s security chief under ex-mayor Sheinbaum, has denied having participated in meetings that fabricated the “historical truth”.
Former attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam, the alleged architect of that version of events, was arrested in 2022 on charges of forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice.
The people responsible “for all these deceptions and manipulations” must be held to account, said Vazquez Arellano.
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