Parents of Missing Mexico Students: Keep Looking for Them

Relatives of the 43 college students missing since September say the Mexican government is “torturing” them by releasing the gruesome confessions of three gang members who say they shot and burned the students.

“For us, these [declarations] are another shameless way in which the federal government is torturing us” Felipe de la Cruz Sandoval, a spokesman for the parents said in a press conference, urging the government to continue its search.

Earlier on Friday, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo showed journalists taped confessions in which three drug traffickers admitted to killing the students from the Ayotzinapa rural teacher’s college after they were detained by police in the city of Iguala. The gangsters said that they burned the bodies of the missing students, and put their remains in trash bags, which were left at a garbage dump near the city of Cocula.

The remains have not been positively identified, and Murillo cautioned that this was just an update on the investigation.

“But our findings lead us to believe that the disappeared youth have been murdered,” he said.

Parents and others, however, accused the government of rushing to close the investigation in order to draw attention away from human rights abuses in the country.

“They are playing with our dignity and our feelings,” Eric Rodriguez, a student leader at the Ayotzinapa college told Fusion in a phone call. “The attorney general is only talking about theories, but he’s not scientifically backing his claims.”

Murillo said that he had met with parents early on Friday to brief them on the confessions obtained from the detained drug traffickers.

For the past several weeks, parents have been at loggerheads with the Mexican government over how the search for the missing students has been conducted.

On repeated occasions parents have insisted that the government not look for their children in clandestine graves. Some parents believe that the missing students could be kidnapped and held somewhere in the mountains of Guerrero state.