On March 7, outside Chilpancingo, Guerrero state police attacked three students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College in Ayotzinapa, killing one and improperly detaining another for more than 10 hours. The State Security Secretariat claimed that the students were traveling in a stolen vehicle, that they shot the officers, and that they were in possession of a firearm, alcohol, and drugs. This version was rejected by the victims' families and questioned by the Guerrero State Attorney General's Office, which handed the investigation over to the Attorney General's Office (FGR) after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador requested that it take over the investigation. The federal agency stated, upon taking charge of the case, that it has "sufficient evidence of human rights violations."
The death of the young student named Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, 23, and the mistreatment to which his wounded classmate was subjected require a rigorous, timely, solid, urgent, and credible investigation, not only out of an imperative for justice and the fight against impunity, but also because it could have been yet another episode of the unjustifiable police violence to which the students of Ayotzinapa have long been subjected. The most painful and terrible case is the murder of three of them and the disappearance of 43 others almost 10 years ago in Iguala. According to available information, this is the latest instance of systematic abuse that has led to dangerous tensions between the rural school and the state government, which has resulted in the burning of police vehicles, the detention of National Guard troops—who were not involved in the matter—and other acts of protest.
On the other hand, a swift and conclusive clarification and the expeditious administration of justice are essential to prevent the attack against Gómez Peralta and his companions from further complicating the growing disagreements between the López Obrador Presidency and the movement of the parents of the 43 children who disappeared on the night of September 26, 2014, just when efforts to uncover the truth surrounding this tragedy appear to be at a standstill, and as the tenth anniversary of the infamy perpetrated in Iguala on that date approaches.
