Lincoln famously said that you can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. And that is what the PGR [Attorney General's Office] has sought to do since the first "historical truth" about the Cocula garbage dump and the Ayotzinapa case. Cheat. Cover up. Distort. Manipulate. But each time in a way that is increasingly clumsier and more obvious, and each time with less credible results.
Surveys reveal it, public opinion knows it, the international community understands it. The government of Mexico, via its institutions of law enforcement and the media that manipulates, is desperately trying to hide what really happened that saddest of nights in Iguala. And it is resorting to the lowest of blows to achieve it. A farce staged in three acts, each worse than the previous one.
Act One: when the unhideable began to become visible through the work of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts [first report in September 2015], it tried to hinder the work that it had yet to do. The tests yet to be completed. The interviews of soldiers in Battalion 27 [present the night of the attacks] they needed to perform. During weeks that became months, the PGR denied access, information, collaboration.
From there it moved to the second stage of disinformation. It began to discredit members of the IGIE, especially the two women who had been prosecutors in Colombia and Guatemala. It began leaking false information to the media that reproduced it uncritically. It built a narrative that painted the IGIE as mercenaries linked to obscure interests, manipulated by the left and anti-government NGOs. It bombarded independent men and women invited here to do what Mexican institutions have failed to do achieve. A thorough investigation. An impartial inquiry. A faultless piece of work.
Act Two: witnessing the grotesque travesty, the international community reacted with vigor and solidarity. Nobel Prize winners and many more united in their support for the IGIEI, applauding them from outside while they were vilified within. Attacked by hired guns like Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who spread fabrications, falsehoods, rumors. In the second act of this farce, we saw how the PGR, which is so ineffective taking action against Moreira [former PRI governor of Coahuila, suspected of money laundering] and others, efficiently accepted the lawsuit against Emilio Alvarez Icaza, Secretary General of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
He is the former president of the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District [Mexico City, 2001-2009] and "ombudsman" for sit-ins and the case of News Divine [discotheque were, in June 2008, 12 people, including 3 police, died from suffocation in a stampede trigged by a large number of police entering to check for drug use and underage drinking. There was only one exit.], and against the effort to have Mexico City's decriminalization of abortion declared unconstitutional. He is an honorable man disqualified by a government that is not. A man with a spine hit by a government that is spineless.
Act Three: The PGR unilaterally publishes partial results of the third survey of the dump, breaking confidentiality agreements signed with the IGIE. A PGR that boasts of an expert study immediately questioned by the Argentine Forensic Team, which states that "to date there has been no identification of any remains of the 43 missing students [by studies] performed on the remains that have been recovered in the Cocula garbage dump". Yes, indeed, there are bones found there, there has been a fire there. There is no evidence that the remains belong to the normal school students or that the previous fires are linked to their alleged incineration. But the PGR insists on its version of the dump because it needs that falsification to make it possible to live with the past. If the "historical truth" turns out to be the "historical lie" detected by the IGIE, there would be much that the Mexican government would still have to investigate, explain, justify, acknowledge.
Everything that is contained in the IGIE's report [of September, 2015] has been dismissed by the PGR, which is obsessed with returning to the Cocula dump. The lines of investigations indicated by the IGIE have been ignored by the PGR because it prefers to offer excuses or sully the messengers or think they can keep fooling some all the time: The existence and fate of the fifth bus [IGIE hypothesis that one of the buses taken by the students from the Iguala bus station could have been carrying drugs and thus precipitated the attack on them by police and members of the Warriors United cartel]. The participation of municipal, state and federal police in the attack on the youths-and much more that night in Iguala. The unexplained presence of the army, described in the magnificent documentary Mirar Morir [Watching Dying], which opens this week at the Cineteca [national movie theater in Mexico City].
Perhaps it will win because it has the brute force of the State. But it will not convince, because to convince it needs to persuade. And to persuade it would need what it does not have: the right and reason.
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*Denise Dresser is a Mexican political analyst, writer, and university professor. After completing undergraduate work at The College of Mexico, she earned her Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton University. She is currently a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM), where she teaches courses such as Comparative Politics, Political Economy and Contemporary Mexican Politics. She has taught at Georgetown University and the University of California. In December 2015, she was decorated as a Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French government. Twitter: @DeniseDresserG