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| Relatives of disappeared persons carry out search activities in the Devil's Cave, Iguala, Guerrero Photo: Octavio Gómez |
The representative of the Others Disappeared from Iguala, Mario Vergara Hernandez, accused the government of Enrique Peña Nieto of violating the precautionary measures ordered by the UN Committee on Forced Disappearances (CED) on behalf of 13 members of the organization.
Vergara Hernandez represents some 400 families of disappeared in the northern region of Guerrero, who have organized the search for remains in the hills surrounding Iguala, after the parents of the 43 disppeared Ayotzinapa normal school students discovered graves with at least 32 bodies.
Because the group The Other Disappeared from Iguala, consisting of between 12 and 15 people, has suffered threats and moves about in areas controlled by organized crime, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances of the UN instructed the Mexican government, on September 27 of last year, to give them protection in their search for bodies, an activity not being carried out by the authorities.
Supported by the Mexican Committee for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH), Id(h)eas for Human Rights Litigation, the National Network of Links for Disappeared Persons and the Mexican Institute for Human Rights and Democracy (IMDHD), members of Others Disappeared signed commitments with the Secretariat of Government Relations (SEGOB), Attorney General's Office (PGR) and the Executive Committee for Victims (CEAV) on January 26 of this year, but according to Vergara, these commitments have not been fully met.
In an interview with Proceso on the eve of participating in an operation to search for human remains in Veracruz, Mario Vergara said that so far SEGOB has not complied with the agreement to provide a van for the organization, police protection during operations in the hills, accompaniment by an agent of the Public Ministry [investigative police] and paramedics during such operations, as well as the cordoning off and guarding bones that are found.
Vergara complains that when accompanied by police, there are only three policemen,
"to care for a group of 12 to 15 people who climb the hills and areas where crimals were and are operating; they stay in their patrol car and as I told Sara Irene Herrerías (head of the Human Rights Unit of SEGOB), one day they are going to kill all of us, because they aren't sending enough police."Mario Vergara, who with other family members has located more than one hundred bodies in clandestine graves, said told the official that he did not understand the reason for the bad treatment, because the Others Disappeared from Iguala was doing the work that is the responsibility of the authorities:
"When the PGR forensic team collects the bones that we have pointed out, there is a group of 10 experts who have 30 or 40 police with them. I ask them, what is the difference? Since we go out doing the very hard work."He complained that the Public Ministry agent assigned to accompany them has not been presented at the excavations since the agreements were signed in January, and there are delays in protecting the remains that are found.
"We have located bones and the police arrive three to six days later to guard them. In Chichihualco, where after the discovery, the Public Ministry saw that there were bones and left; then, at night, bad people burned the remains and, when they came to protect them, they were badly damaged.
"Last Sunday (April 3) we located another grave with remains, but it wasn't until Wednesday that they went to collect the bones. The government isn't interested in the issue of the disappeared, even when they have signed agreements," he said.He added that the members of the search team have been threatened by members of organized crime to stop looking at the hills, which prompted the precautionary measures, but
"they gave us nothing more than a phone number of a head of the Federal Police in Iguala and told us that when we feel threatened we should call it. We're an hour from Iguala and if there is traffic, it's two hours. What they offer is absurd, it's theater."He also noted that, a year and four months since several relatives agreed to go out to search for their family members in the hills, of the hundred bodies they have found, the PGR has identified only 15.
"We are a group of 400 families, of which only 280 have filed criminal charges and have had DNA testing, When we complain to the PGR why they haven't identified all the bodies, they say that it's because there are no formal criminal complaints, but the first thing they did was tell people that it didn't matter whether they filed complaints, the DNA was enough.
"At first we did not know why the people from the PGR said that. Many people asked to have samples taken but they didn't file a complaint. We now know that is so they can say to the international organizations that there are not many cases of disappeared persons."As for the performance of the Executive Committee for Victims [established by the General Victims Law in 2013], Vergara reproached it, as it was recently announced that 400 records of cases had been lost, with the only explanation being that there had been a change of the personnel responsible for their care.
Juan Carlos Gutierrez, director of Id(h)eas, considered that
"the systematic failure of the authorities in protecting the families, their discoveries and in fulfilling the guarantees for their safety are part of a steady deterioration in the position of Mexico in meeting its international human rights obligations."The human rights defender believes that the Mexican government has shown serious contempt for the precautionary measures issued by the UN Committee on Forced Disappearances, among which are
"the establishment of a security protocol; legal, psychological and medical support; safeguarding the bodies or skeletons that are found, and the processing of data which must be disclosed to the victims themselves. All of this not been attended to by the Mexican State."Gutiérrez Contreras questioned the failure to fulfill the urgent actions called for by the UN,
"despite continuing insecurity in the state, where since 2012 more than 500 skeletons have been found in clandestine graves, and in 2015 Norma Bruno Roman and Miguel Angel Jimenez Blanco, of the Union of Peoples and Organizations of the State of Guerrero [UPOEG], were killed during their search for bodies in clandestine graves."Spanish original