Global Courant 2023-05-18 03:13:52
This is José Luis Abarca, who governed Iguala. He was found guilty of kidnapping six social leaders in 2013. A year later he was arrested for alleged participation in the disappearance of 43 young people in Ayotzinapa.
A former mayor of the Mexican municipality of Iguala was sentenced to 92 years in prison for the kidnapping of six people in 2013, a fact that adds to his alleged responsibility for the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa students in 2014, judicial sources reported.
José Luis Abarca, 62, was found guilty of kidnapping six social leaders in May 2013 in the municipality of Iguala (in the southern state of Guerrero). Among those people was Arturo Hernández Cardona, leader of a peasant organization, who was found dead months later.
Abarca must also pay a fine of 920,700 pesos (about $52,000).
The politician was the mayor of Iguala when the disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural school occurred between September 26 and 27, 2014, one of the worst cases of human rights violations in Mexico, which unleashed a wide international condemnation.
Abarca has remained a fugitive from justice since the crisis broke out and was arrested in November 2014 with his wife in a house in Iztapalapa.
The former mayor was arrested for alleged responsibility in the disappearance of the students and is currently in jail in the central State of Mexico.
The case of the 43 disappeared teenagers
The students disappeared when they tried to seize buses to travel to Mexico City and participate in demonstrations in remembrance of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968.
The young men were detained by policemen in collusion with drug traffickers from the Guerreros Unidos cartel, who murdered them by mistaking them for members of a rival gang, according to the official version at the time.
But a commission of the current government that investigated the case maintains that the criminals -in complicity with the police and the military- sought to recover drugs hidden in one of the buses, without the students knowing of its existence.
So far, only the remains of three of the victims have been identified.
DB
