Retired judge arrested in connection with disappearance and presumed murders of 43 students in Mexico
Mexican authorities on Wednesday arrested a former senior judge in connection with the disappearance and presumed murders of 43 students a decade ago.
Lambertina Galeana, who faces charges of forced disappearance, is accused of helping to conceal videos that allegedly showed the incident unfolding, a government statement said.
Security camera videos allegedly captured the moment the students were kidnapped by armed men right in front of a judicial building, El Pais reported. In 2022, a commission concluded that Galeana ordered the videos destroyed because the images "were not clear due to technical problems," the outlet reported.
The case, one of the violence-plagued country's worst human rights atrocities, has become emblematic of a missing persons crisis that has seen more than 120,000 people disappear.
Galeana, now retired, was president of the Superior Court of Justice in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, where the students from a rural teacher training college disappeared in September 2014.
So far, the remains of only three of the missing students have been found and identified, and relatives denounce impunity.
The students from the Ayotzinapa school — whose members have a history of political activism — had commandeered buses to travel to a demonstration in Mexico City when they went missing.
Relatives and sympathizers of 43 missing Ayotzinapa university students march with a banner displaying the portraits and names of the students, on the ninth anniversary of their disappearance, in Mexico City, Sept. 26, 2023.
Marco Ugarte / AP
Investigators believe they were abducted by a drug cartel with the help of corrupt police, although exactly what happened is unclear.
In 2022, a truth commission set up by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's government branded the case a "state crime" and said the military shared responsibility, either directly or through negligence.
That same year, federal agents arrested former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, who oversaw the original investigation.
The commission found that the army was aware of what was happening and had real-time information about the kidnapping and disappearance.
One theory the commission put forward was that cartel members targeted the students because they had unknowingly taken a bus with drugs hidden inside.
The incident drew international condemnation and shocked a nation where criminal violence, much of it linked to drug trafficking, has claimed around 480,000 lives since 2006.
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