The tortured in the Iguala case

The statements of five about the garbage dump and the river have indisputable judicial value. Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas on Friday differentiated the version of his Truth Commission from the one held by the former Attorney General’s Office. The dissimilarity, he boasted, is “substantial and fundamental: the ‘historical truth’ was based on the statements obtained through torture of the detainees, on the fabrication of evidence and the manipulation of the crime scene.” The elaboration of “evidence” is as delicate as it is criminal because it implies criminal responsibilities in the agents of the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office who participated in the investigations; certified experts in various disciplines by the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute, as well as the Mexican Petroleum Institute; world eminences in matters of fire, criminalistics, criminology, entomology, forensic botanists, pathologists, and others whose work supports the historical “truth” (or not, there are too many adjectives), which no one has been able to overthrow. That “manipulation” starts from the assumption that the PGR adulterated the place of the criminal act: the Cocula garbage dump and the San Juan.La statement of the undersecretary on the confessions under torture, the fabrication of the “historical truth” and the manipulation of “the crime scene” part of the abysmal error of imagining that the PGR mounted the case in statements of the detainees who were taken out by force. Assuming without conceding that the confessions under torture were decisive to invent a hoax, it is worth separating the proven ones from those that did not: Of the nine perpetrators who confessed and described in official statement the events in the garbage dump and the river, torture was demonstrated in four and their statements have no probative value, they cannot be used as evidence. The remaining five have indisputable judicial value. In its Double Injustice Report on the case, UN Human Rights presumed that 34 defendants were tortured. And in its First Report, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts reported the possibility that more than 80 had been subjected to torture, but in its Second Report it lowered its expectations to just 17 cases. Nothing to do with the figures of the UNHR and the GIEI with the 77 cases that are affirmed today. These are the nine that refer to the events of the “historical truth”: Jonathan Osorio Cortéz, El Jona; Patricio Reyes Landa, El Pato; Miguel Ángel Landa Bahena, El Duva; Felipe Rodríguez Salgado, El Cepillo; Gildardo López Astudillo, El Gil; Agustín García Reyes, El Chereje; Bernabé Sotelo Salinas, El Peluco; Cruz Sotelo Salinas, El Oaxaco, and Juan Miguel Pantoja Miranda, El Pajarraco.All, with the exception of the last one, made the detailed description of the facts of the garbage dump and the river in their ministerial statements. And El Pajarraco did not “sing” before the police or military, but gave testimony while in prison to the visitors of the National Human Rights Commission.



Original source in Spanish