MEXICO CITY—An appeals court ruling is threatening to derail Mexico’s effort to prosecute suspects in one of its most notorious crimes of recent years: the disappearance and presumed murder of 43 students in Guerrero state.
The injunction, issued late last year but not yet publicized, orders the state judge overseeing the case to correct flaws in its case against 22 police officers who are accused of killing four people on the night the students vanished.
The case of the 43 teachers’ college students is one of the most widely protested and troubling examples of human rights abuses in Mexico’s recent history—one that has shaken faith in all levels of government.
Federal prosecutors say the local police killed several people, rounded up the students and handed them over to a drug cartel, which killed them, possibly suspecting they were linked to rivals.
But the bodies have not been found, the motives are in dispute and outside investigators have suggested that state and perhaps even federal agents may have played a role in the disappearances.
The injunction, which came in response to an appeal of the charges by lawyers for the 22 police officers, found prosecutorial errors including inconsistent testimony and scant evidence. If those can’t be fixed, the case would be thrown out.
The appellate ruling shows the entire case was built on “foundations of mud,” said Sayuri Herrera, the lawyer for the family of Julio Cesar Mondragon, a 22-year-old student who was found dead in the city of Iguala on Sept. 27, 2014, the morning after the disappearances. There were signs of torture on his body and the skin was flayed from his face.
“Nearly all the prosecutions underway could fall apart,” Herrera said, “because nearly all were carried out, at least at the beginning, by the same people”—Guerrero state prosecutors.
