Four years have passed since 43 male students from an Ayotzinapa teachers college went missing. In that time, the government has failed to punish those responsible for the crime. And while many may have moved on since, the parents of the students who went missing have not. They continue to call for justice and reject the official account, partly based on a confession acquired through torture, from Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration. Now, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador steps into his new role as president of Mexico, he has promised to do things differently, and this includes re-investigating the Ayotzinapa case.
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AMLO will create a truth commission to get to the bottom of what happened in Iguala. “I assure you there will be no impunity in this sad, painful case nor in any other,” he said, according to The Guardian. “I hope that we will soon know the truth. That there’s justice and an example is set to never again human rights are violated in our country, so that no other Mexican suffers the disappearance of their children.”
For the parents of the missing, this is an important moment. The government has officially said that the bodies were burned in a rubbish dump, but experts have refuted this account because the evidence doesn’t match up. However, there is, rightfully, wariness. The parents have sought support outside of their country because the government hasn’t backed them up, and they’ve been mocked and humiliated throughout the last four years. Still, María Martínez, the mother of student Miguel Ángel Hernández Martínez, asked AMLO to “pull us from this garbage dump Enrique Peña Nieto left us in.”