New Mexico President Pledges Truth Commission Into 43 Disappeared Trainee Teachers
WHAT HAPPENED?
To launch inquiry into one of the country’s darkest mysteries.
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Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has ordered the creation of a truth commission into one of the country’s most notorious unsolved crimes: the kidnapping and presumed murder of 43 trainee teachers who were “disappeared” after they were attacked by cartel gunmen and corrupt police officers in 2014. The incident became a byword for the country’s senseless violence and corruption. The unarmed trainee teachers, who studied at a famously radical teacher-training college, were fired on by police and gang members after they commandeered several buses to get home from a demonstration. However, it is believed police then handed the teachers over to the local drug gang, with whom they were corruptly in league, who murdered them. “I assure you there will be no impunity in this sad, painful case nor in any other,” López Obrador said, “I hope that we will soon know the truth. That there’s justice and an example is set so never again human rights are violated in our country, so that no other Mexican suffers the disappearance of their children.”
