Yesterday, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (IGIE) for the Iguala case denounced the campaign
''of [charges of] personal incompetence and slander'' orchestrated against them, which is intended to "close down the space in the search for truth'' and create confusion "with hackneyed political stigmas used against human rights defenders."Admitting that these media attacks jeopardize their work, the experts reported that they have asked the Mexican government for public clarification, ''but it has not happened.''
The attacks agains the IGIE, directed specifically against its two female members, Guatemalan Claudia Paz and Colombian Ángela Buitrago—both prosecutors in their respective countries who led judicial proceedings in landmark cases of transitional justice—worsened toward the end of October when, during the last meeting with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), the IGIE team succeeded in signing an agreement with the Mexican government to create a new investigative agency that relies on the Deputy Prosecutor for Human Rights of the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR), rather than the SEIDO (Deputy Prosecutor Specialized in Investigation of Organized Crime).
In these apparently orchestrated attacks, personalities linked to the most conservative sectors of the political spectrum have taken part; for example, Sra. Isabel Miranda de Wallace and lawyer José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, whose organization, the Citizens' Council for Justice and Security, even created a blog that assembles all these expressions.
IGIE members yesterday stated that they would not try to describe where these attempts to discredit them come from:
''Our group has not responded. It has opted for getting on with the work and doing its job."Carlos Beristain, psychologist and IGIE member, turned to a medical metaphor: in the face of the ''open wound'' that the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students represents for Mexico, the IGIE is
''like a vaccine that one hopes will stimulate efforts for combating impunity."
''We are,'' he added, ''a small group—a team of just ten people—and we see ourselves as an element that can reinforce the defenses of the State and stimulate resistance against impunity.''
However,
''there are people for whom the IGIE is a foreign body. Rather than that they are in the presence of a medicine capable of generating antibodies for an open wound, they feel the IGIE is something against which they must react in opposition, that they have to put in a capsule. In this case, we are faced with bad news, because if this view is the one that ends up dominating, the end result will be smaller, more limited. And we are at this point in this moment, because time is short and the task is enormous.''
Last January, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a statement declaring their ''full, absolute and unconditional support '' of the International Group of Independent Experts.
In private or individually, government officials, such as Deputy Secretary of Human Rights at SEGOB [Secretariat of Government Relations], Roberto Campa, issued statements positively valuing the IGIE's work, but no agency has done so at the institutional level. Beristain said,
In private or individually, government officials, such as Deputy Secretary of Human Rights at SEGOB [Secretariat of Government Relations], Roberto Campa, issued statements positively valuing the IGIE's work, but no agency has done so at the institutional level. Beristain said,
''It would be positive to have a more general statement on behalf of the government.''
But he then explained that the IGIE would not place a value on these omissions. Spanish original