Mexico court clears 3 soldiers in 2014 gang suspect massacre

Rappler.com

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

Mexico court clears 3 soldiers in 2014 gang suspect massacre
The 3 Mexican soldiers have been freed by a judge for lack of evidence to the dismay of human rights group

MEXICO CITY, Mexico – Three Mexican soldiers accused of taking part in a massacre of 22 gang suspects in 2014 have been freed by a judge for lack of evidence, officials said, drawing dismay from human rights groups.

The soldiers — the last of 7 initially charged — were accused of killing 8 of the suspected gang members in cold blood in a warehouse in the central municipality of Tlatlaya on June 30, 2014.

The army initially said the 22 suspects were killed in a shootout.

But a woman who survived said many of those killed, including her 15-year-old daughter, were executed by the soldiers after surrendering.

Four of the arrested soldiers had already been released last October for lack of evidence.

Ruling in the case against the remaining 3 soldiers, the judge found the state had again failed to prove its case, the prosecutor’s office said Friday, May 13, in a statement.

However the attorney general’s office said in a statement late Saturday, May 14, that it will provide “evidence proving the guilt” of those 3 soldiers “so that they are re-apprehended and formally processed.”

The office vowed to “carry out all steps necessary to provide the evidence required in order to prevent that crimes committed” in Tlatlaya “go unpunished.”

The 7 soldiers, including a commanding officer, were earlier acquitted by a military court, though it sentenced the officer to a year in prison for disobeying orders to undertake nighttime operations only with his full squad of 30 troops.

The National Human Rights Commission had determined that between 12 and 15 of the gang suspects were executed.

Military strained in drug fight

The case has put a spotlight on the controversial use of the armed forces to combat drug cartels in Mexico.

Troops have faced accusations of torture and abuse since then-president Felipe Calderon deployed thousands of soldiers to combat gangs in 2006. More than 100,000 people have died or gone missing since then, many of them victims of drug cartel turf wars.

The group Human Rights Watch voiced dismay, slamming the court’s decision as potentially a “coverup.”

“Given the well documented evidence that soldiers executed civilians in Tlatlaya, the fact that no one has been held responsible for those crimes suggests the same kind of gross incompetence, or even coverup, that has been shown in the case of the (43 students who went missing from) Ayotzinapa on the part of judicial authorities,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, HRW director for Latin America, told Agence France-Presse.

The acquittal “is utterly grave because it bolsters impunity in one of the most glaring cases of human rights violations by the military in Mexico’s recent history,” added Santiago Aguirre with the rights organization Prodh.

In the Ayotzinapa case, the 43 young men had come from Tixtla, a town in the impoverished southern state of Guerrero, where they studied at a rural teachers’ college

Prosecutors say the students were whisked away by corrupt police in the city of Iguala on September 26, 2014, after they hijacked buses to be used for a future protest.

But the experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, who were invited by the government to aid the probe at the parents’ request, rejected the central conclusion in the case.

The experts said there was no scientific proof that the students’ bodies were burned in a funeral pyre at a garbage dump after they were killed by a drug gang.

That mass disappearance wrecked President Enrique Pena Nieto’s effort to shift attention away from Mexico’s drug violence and toward his ambitious economic reform agenda.

But while his popularity has dropped to 30 percent, his Institutional Revolutionary Party and its allies still managed to keep their majority in the lower house of Congress in elections last year. – Rappler.com

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!