By Inés Amarelo
Mexico City, Sep 26 (EFE).- Thousands of people marched in Mexico City on Tuesday on the ninth anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in the southern state of Guerrero in protest of setbacks in the case after years of little progress.
“It is categorically stated that the motive for the murder of, the disappearance of the young people is due to a dispute between the criminal groups, that the students were infiltrated by criminal groups, they are statements that are closer to the historical truth than to the new investigations,” Vidulfo Rosales, the lawyer representing the students’ parents, told reporters.
The march, the largest in recent years, started at the iconic Angel of Independence monument and moved to the Zocalo, the city’s main square, where the presidential residence is located.
The parents, visibly exhausted after a week of protest activities in the Mexican capital and nine years of struggle to find out what happened to their children, led the march and stood in front of anti-monument “+43” that pays tribute to the missing students and is located on the Paseo de la Reforma.
Upon arriving at the Zocalo they held a rally where they said that their priority was to know the whereabouts of their children and demanded once again that investigations be continued rigorously and seriously.
They also stressed the need for the army to release missing information.
In a meeting with the interior ministry on Monday, the parents of the young men accused President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of covering up for the army, whom they accuse of not providing all the information on the case.
After the meeting, Rosales told the media that the interior ministry is offering a narrative similar to the so-called “historical truth” that the government of former President Enrique Peña Nieto wanted to establish regarding the case.
On Tuesday, the lawyer said that the statement presented to the parents on the previous day uses evidence that has already been dismissed and does not make any headway in the main objective of the relatives, which is to know what happened to the young people and their whereabouts.
On Sep. 20, the parents told President Obrador that the army had not delivered relevant documents that could shed light on the night of Sep. 26, 2014 but the president insisted that all the information was already with the attorney general’s office.
“It is the (information) that we have so far, there is no more, if they believe that there is information that we are hiding, I tell them: it is not true,” the president said at his regular morning press conference on Tuesday. EFE
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