The human remains – in the process of study – found in more than twenty bags, known as “petrosas” due to their hardness and the fact that they were subjected to high temperatures, found in the Cocula garbage dump and in the San Joaquín River, are part of a set of “many” body fragments rescued inside and outside the El Ángel funeral home, in Iguala, Guerrero. These were not taken into account by the investigations and, according to the most recent investigations by the Attorney General's Office of the Republic, they are considered a factor that could drive a profound change in the entire narrative about the disappearance of the young people from Ayotzinapa.
The omission of these elements, possibly probative of what happened on the night of Iguala, could have perverted the entire investigation and that is why today they are under rigorous studies. A group of forensic researchers has taken on the task of finding out which evidence was not analyzed in previous studies.
Some of these “petrosas”, which were found during the entire time of the investigation in various places, were visible to the experts of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) and the civil organizations involved in the case, but none of them found the fact relevant and they were dismissed, because, it is said, they could support the so-called “historical truth”, which the organizations representing the parents of the victims of the “Iguala night” refuse to accept.
Many of the human remains were found in the same funeral home and, many others, in various places in Iguala. Many of these bones are found in more than 20 “petrosas” that have been unearthed and, it can be said, they are barely being studied, with no results to date confirming whether they belong to the 43 missing.
It should be remembered that the funeral home had control – as a concession from the government – of the Forensic Medical Service since 2011, the first year of Ángel Aguirre Rivero's government, and also had three crematory ovens; one of them operated clandestinely and had no official record. Today, the funeral home is, perhaps, the most important point of new lines of research.
The first bag found in the Cocula garbage dump was in the hands of the investigators and also of the government apparatus that supposedly sought to clarify the disappearance of the 43. There is no greater depth in the work of the experts at that time or in that of the governments, both the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Morena, who were responsible for carrying out the investigations, regarding the remains found in the bags.
The stories of some of the parents assure that the representatives, in general, decided not to ask for more information about what the “petrosas” contained, a decision that was supported by them. The first bag with remains appeared in 2014 and, although it was required that they be analyzed by foreign experts, until now there have been no results from the investigations.
When listening to the stories of people involved in the investigations, it is striking how they notice that the first bag, labeled with apparently human remains, spent years “kept” in the clandestine crematorium attached to the funeral home, without being given the importance that it has today for the authorities in charge of following the case.
The more than 20 bags of remains, as far as we can tell, have now been subjected to a series of laboratory analyzes to try to scientifically prove who they belonged to.
What is increasingly difficult to clarify in the investigation is why it was overlooked, or why they did not want to investigate more about the bags and their contents. The version that they do not want to give any credibility to the so-called “historical truth” is the one that sounds the most, but for current investigators it is necessary to intensify the search in every meter of the funeral home, because there is a suspicion that there are still “petrosas” buried.
Thus, the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum, committed to investigations, has had to face the structure of a network of complicities, not yet denounced, that made invisible a series of evidence and data that could have shed light on the case and that were revealed with the review that the Attorney General's Office of the Republic made of statements and elements that were ignored or discarded and that today seem to call out names, such as that of Aguirre Rivero, that have remained in impunity.
The revelations released in recent days warn of the omission, or of a possible agreement between figures with political influence, which made people involved immune, such as the case of the then governor Ángel Aguirre, and in which the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) becomes the apex of all complicities, warn the data obtained by this newspaper and which, according to sources, are found in the statements, mainly from the parents of the disappeared, collected by the authorities involved in the case.
But the PRD is not alone in the chain; There they join the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the group of experts known as GIEI and some entities from the structure of the powerful civil organizations, who did not find, neither in the evidence nor in the statements, anything that could lead the investigations towards some figures of the civil power.
To establish these links, it is necessary to remember that the PRD New Left current – whose main leaders, Jesús Ortega and Jesús Zambrano – participated directly, say the chronicles of the moment, in the construction of the candidacy of Ángel Aguirre, a PRI member whose mandate was given to replace Rubén Figueroa, who left the government in 1996 in the midst of a social crisis caused by the massacre of Aguas Blancas, a town on the Costa Grande, in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez, in which 17 farmers died at the hands of the state police.
Years later, rejected by the PRI, which preferred to give the state candidacy to Manuel Añorve, Aguirre sought a second term and, supported by the PRD group of Nueva Izquierda, became the winning candidate in the gubernatorial elections, a victory that came accompanied by that of José Luis Abarca for the mayor of Iguala. Ángel Aguirre left his position after the events in which the 43 students from Ayotzinapa disappeared.
It is not possible to omit the fact that, both in Aguas Blancas and Ayotzinapa, the local police were identified as the main piece, or the only one, in the repression that occurred.
The above is one of the three axes in which the investigation was developed, in which, as established, Aguirre Rivero and José Luis Abarca are linked in the political structure that pulled the strings of power in Guerrero since before the events of the night of Iguala.
The investigations do not stop. According to those trying to know what happened that night of September 26 to 27 almost 12 years ago, there are still elements that have not been analyzed and that could establish new hypotheses.
What is clear to everyone is that it is very difficult, after so much time and so many “perverse” interventions, to know exactly the whereabouts of the 43 students, but they are sure that the guilty parties will pay.
