The story is well known. According to federal prosecutors, the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca — affiliated to the center left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) — and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa ordered the police on September 27 to arrest the 43 native teaching students and then hand them over to the local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos — United Warriors. 

The Warriors then, on Abarca’s orders, killed the student activists enrolled at the Ayotzinapa native teaching college and burnt their bodies to dispose of the evidence. 

However, a report in Mexico’s weekly El Proceso last month suggests that the Federal Police and army, and not Abarca and Guerreros Unidos, were responsible for the disappearance of the 43 students. 

Reporters Anable Hernandez and Steve Fisher in La Historia no Oficial (The Unofficial Story) based their conclusions on leaked documents from the state government, interviews with local witnesses and videos taken by the disappeared students with their mobile phones. 

The students were being tracked from Mexico City’s control, command, communications and computation center — a communications structure used by the federal and local police and army — as soon as they departed from their school in Ayotzinapa on September 26. 

Heavily armed security forces attacked the students when they arrived in Iguala on their way to Mexico City to participate in a demonstration to commemorate the hundreds of students massacred by the army and police there in 1968 — a massacre that was ordered by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — the same political party that is in power today. 

The Federal Police informed the 27th Infantry Battalion, stationed in Iguala, of the attack and the unit’s troops were in the area when the attack was launched. A compiled video taken from the footage the students took with their mobile phones — posted on the El Proceso website — shows the unarmed students being attacked by security forces. Comments such as “don’t shoot,” “get down,” “they already killed one” can be heard amid gunfire. One student remarks: “The police are leaving, the federal (police) are going to stay. They’re going to hassle us.” 

Hernandez and Fisher also discovered that the five Warriors who implicated Abarca and his wife had been tortured during interrogation. 

While the PRI government of Enrique Pena Nieto has so far refused to comment on the El Proceso story, the federal attorney general told the parents of the disappeared students last week that they have no evidence that either the Federal Police or army were involved in the crime. 

But many Mexicans believe that the Federal Police and army were very likely to have been involved the disappearence, however the demands to access the base of the 27th Infantry Battalion to search for the 43 students or their remains has been refused. 

The base is equipped with large ovens capable of cremating human bodies. 

After being denied permission to enter the base, thousands of demonstrators forced their way in after smashing through the front gate. Soldiers and police drove demonstrators off the base. 

At the request of the parents of the disappeared students the National Human Rights Commission announced that it will be investigating the battalion for possible violation of human rights. 

The parents also asked the commission to ask Pena Nieto to withdraw the army from Guerrero state because of human rights abuses. 

Retired general Jose Francisco Gallardo Rodriguez told La Jornada this week that Mexican army bases have ovens as well as detention facilities for political prisoners. 

Rodriguez was himself imprisoned for nine years — 1993-2002 — at the Number One military base in the Federal District for demanding the establishment of the post of military ombudsman. 

“In the Number One military base there are basements with political prisoners. That’s where they kept me — naked. I saw cables, buckets of water, everything they use for torture. I thought they were going to kill me,” he said.

Rodriguez believes that the army is involved in the disappearance of the students: “As soon as I heard the Iguala story I said: it was the army. They are the only ones responsible because they have militarised the entire state. And who is ultimately responsible? The supreme commander of the armed forces, Enrique Pena Nieto.”

The security forces are accused of killing unarmed civilians elsewhere. “Mexico is facing its worse human rights crisis in years, with security forces committing horrific abuses that are rarely punished,” said Daniel Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch (HRW). 

“The Pena Nieto administration has so far failed to take this crisis seriously and US President Barack Obama has been unwilling to call them on it. Since former Mexican president Felipe Calderon began ‘a war on drugs’ in 2007, Mexican security forces have engaged in egregious violations, including torture, extra judicial executions and enforced disappearances. HRW has documented such abuses by security forces throughout the country, including 149 cases of extra judicial executions. United Nations human rights monitors have found that torture is a generalised practice in the country and that extra judicial executions by security forces have been widespread.”

HRW is calling on the Obama administration to halt aid to Mexican security forces until human rights violations are investigated and prosecuted. 

If the El Proceso report is correct in that the Federal Police and army were responsible for disappearing the 43 students, the Iguala massacre allowed the right-wing PRI government of Pena Nieto to kill two birds with one stone — eliminate the pesky activist students and discredit the PRD, the main center-left opposition party in Mexico.