TIERRA BLANCA, Mexico – Relatives of the five young people who disappeared Jan. 11 in the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz will accept authorities’ account that they are dead “the day there is evidence,” a family member of two of the youths told EFE on Tuesday.
“We are not satisfied,” Bernardo Benitez said, referring to statements earlier Tuesday by Government Undersecretary for Human Rights Roberto Campa, who said the missing five were slain and their bodies burned.
“Based on the information that we have, (the young people) were burned, later grinded down, likely in a sugar mill, and thrown into a small river,” Campa told Televisa.
He said the account was based on testimony from one of the suspects, police officer Ruben Perez, but Benitez said in an interview with EFE that the cop’s version “must be treated as just another statement in the investigation.”
“As there have been seven earlier statements (from other police), this is the eighth statement given by a person who was apparently involved in the events,” said Benitez, the father and uncle, respectively, of two of the missing young people.
The five victims – four young men and a 16-year-old girl – were arrested by state police at a gas station in Tierra Blanca, a town in central Veracruz, as they returned from vacation, with the incident caught by security cameras and witnessed by a neighbor of one of the young men.
Asked whether the families would accept that their loved ones were dead, Benitez replied: “With words, we do not accept it. With irrefutable evidence, yes we would accept it.”
He said the families plan to remain camped outside the Tierra Blanca branch of the state AG Office until the case is fully solved and those who masterminded the crime are in custody.
“Because we must remember that there is always a boss and we must get to him, because there have been many misfortunes here and we want this to be the last one that happens, so all of the criminals must fall,” Benitez said.
What the families want, he said, “are results, that the five kids appear, in one way or another. From there that justice begins to be done. Because it cannot be that this situation is happening, with so many disappearances and so very many people looking for their relatives.”
Benitez’s caution about the account offered by Campa appears to be shared by the head of Mexico’s Federal Police, Enrique Galindo, who described testimony of officer Perez as “not definitive” and said that the search for the missing youths continues.
Campa acknowledged that the Tierra Blanca case was similar to the one involving the disappearance of nearly four dozen education students in the southern state of Guerrero.
On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, police in the city of Iguala attacked students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a nearby teachers training institution, after the aspiring educators had commandeered buses that they planned to use to travel to Mexico City for a protest.
Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students were abducted that night.
Federal officials say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala’s crooked mayor.
The cops handed over the students to Guerreros Unidos cartel gunmen, who killed the young people and burned their bodies at a garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula, according to the official story.
But the parents of the missing students reject that account and a report issued last September by a group of independent experts working for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights cited multiple irregularities in the investigation.
Among other things, the experts concluded that “no evidence exists to support the theory” that 43 bodies were incinerated at the dump on Sept. 27, 2014, the day after the students disappeared.
