A forensic team just raised troubling questions about one of Mexico's most notorious crimes

Reuters

Argentine forensics experts said on Tuesday they had found the remains of 19 people in a dump in southwestern Mexico where the government claimed 43 missing students were incinerated in 2014, but no sign of the students.

The student teachers disappeared in the southwestern city of Iguala, in Guerrero state, in September 2014, in an incident that sparked an international outcry over human-rights abuse, forced disappearances, and killings committed with impunity in Mexico.

In the wake of their disappearance, it was reported by the government that the students were abducted by corrupt police officers, who killed several students in the process. 

Their abduction was allegedly ordered by the town's mayor; military personnel observed the crime but failed to stop it.

The gang members killed the students and destroyed their bodies in a bonfire in the dump in the nearby town of Cocula, according to the government's account.

Reuters

However, a 2015 report by an international panel of experts severely questioned the government's account, rejecting the central claim that the students were incinerated in the dump. So far, the remains of only one of the 43 students has been positively identified.

The Argentine forensic report, which is unable to shed light on the unsolved mystery of where the students might be, further undermines the government's handling of one of the most notorious crimes of Mexico's recent drug-scarred history.

Reuters

"Until now, the EAAF (Team of Argentine Forensic Anthropology) has not found scientific evidence to establish any link between the remains recovered in the Cocula dump and the missing students," the report said.

After combing the site, the Argentine team found various teeth and bone fragments of 19 different people, ranging between 15 and 38 years of age.

The Argentine report is not the first to dispute the government's account of the crime, but it does deepen the concern about the investigation.

"The government’s case is mostly built on the confessions of the alleged perpetrators," security analyst and El Daily Post editor Alejandro Hope wrote earlier this week.

Reuters"But if they lied (or were forced to lie) about the fire, what else is untrue? How much credence should a judge lend to statements that are openly contradicted by physical evidence?"

"The whole argumentative edifice is built on super flimsy foundations," Hope added.

The southwestern state of Guerrero, where the incident took place, is one of the most violent regions of the country, with various drug gangs fighting over control of a growing opium-smuggling business.

Drug-related violence in Guerrero is longstanding, and then-Gov. Rogelio Ortega Martínez compared the state to Afghanistan in an August interview with The New York Times. “We are pretty much in the same place, even though we are just one state and they are a country,” he said.

“There is not real order [in Guerrero]. We are governed by narcos,” a farmer told The New York Times.

Violence stemming from Mexico's war on drugs and drug cartels has taken the lives of more than 100,000 people in the country since 2007.

(Reporting by Lizbeth Diaz; Editing by Tom Brown)

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