Photo: Deposit Photos

By KELIN DILLON 

Less than a week after families of the 43 disappeared students from Mexico’s Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and the federal government to demand answers about the military’s involvement in the 2014 event, the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR) Alejandro Gertz Manero released the military’s 239-page statement as per the nation’s transparency law, with the majority of the document redacted.

A lawyer to the families Vidulfo Rosales had previously mentioned the government’s unwillingness to investigate more into the military’s role in the disappearance, made clear by the FGR’s highly-redacted statement released despite what Rosales said is clear evidence of their involvement.

Within the document, some pages are so heavily blacked out that only one or two words remain, while the more legible pages only tend to recount irrelevant information to the subject.

While AMLO had previously promised via his creation of a “truth commission” to find out what happened to the missing students no matter the army’s involvement, his government has not followed through on the commitment, with only 30 of the 44 summoned military personnel appearing to testify in court, with the other 14 not facing any repercussions.

Back in 2015, a 54,000 file on the Ayotzinapa disappearance was declassified and put on the internet by the previous iteration of the FGR, the Public Ministry of the Federation (PGR), which revealed a multitude of discrepancies across the officially accepted version of the events from the purported reality, as well as a major milestone for transparency in Mexico.

Now, the current FGR has delivered a much shorter and heavily redacted version of the same document to the public, marking a step backwards in the country’s quest toward transparency.