The publication of a report on a seriously flawed police inquiry into the abduction and murder in 2014 of 43 students is deeply damaging to the credibility of Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto who took office in 2012 promising to reduce violence. And it exposes once again the notoriously corrupt and often brutal justice system, not least police corruption and links with drug gangs.
The students from Ayotzinapa, in the violent southwestern state of Guerrero, were attending a local teachers' college. They intended to join a protest march a few days later in Mexico City, and to get there they did as they had done before: they "borrowed" some buses from the municipality.
The government has since repeatedly insisted that the students were then abducted in the town of Iguala by corrupt police who handed them over to the drug gang Guerreros Unidos. The cartel then burned the students in a nearby dump, according to a government investigation.
No bodies were recovered nor were there satisfactory answers as to what actually happened. There are strong suggestions of collusion by federal police and intelligence agents in the killings.
Responding to widespread public protests at what was perceived as a slipshod, half-hearted official police inquiry, the government reluctantly agreed to the establishment of an international panel, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, whose two reports are damning of the official inquiries.
The report, published last week, claims that five suspects whose testimony underpinned the government’s version of the abductions and killings gave confessions “under torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment”. It faults investigators for failing to explore leads, for refusing to amend prior findings in the face of new evidence, and for obstructing the collection of evidence by the panel.
The first part of the report released last September said that witnesses reported having seen federal police officials and military personnel at the site of the abduction. Serious questions remain to be answered.