The mothers and fathers of the 43 students held a rally at the headquarters of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), voicing strong objections to the recommendation issued on July 9, which exonerates the Mexican military of responsibility for the forced disappearance of the teacher-training students, downplays the investigations and reports of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), and criminalizes the human rights organizations supporting the families.
The parents’ attorney, Isidoro Vicario, recalled that during his first campaign rally in Iguala, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pledged to investigate all authorities and agencies responsible for the students’ disappearance. The parents told him that the military also bore responsibility, and he said he would investigate it, “because I am convinced that if an investigation into the military is launched, it will not harm the institution; on the contrary, it will strengthen it. That is why the president of the CNDH cannot deceive us with her recommendation, which is not the result of dialogue with the families.”
The attorney pointed out that the president of the CNDH, Rosario Piedra, held only two meetings with the mothers and fathers—one at the Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College in March 2021 and another on March 25, 2022, in Mexico City. On the last occasion, the president, Omar Pasarán Nieto, Francisco Estrada Correa, Rosa Isela Martínez, and Luciana Pomposo signed a five-point document that has yet to be fulfilled: “The first agreement was that the CNDH would investigate SEDENA (Secretariat of National Defense) for its involvement in the case and for obstructing the recommendations of the expert panel. The second point is that the CNDH was to investigate personnel from the Attorney General’s Office regarding the murder of El Caderas, a member of an organized crime group who had an arrest warrant against him but was shot more than 20 times. The third point concerned the delay in the extraditions of Tomás Zerón de Lucio and Ulises Bernabé. The fourth point is that the CNDH was going to assist before the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation regarding the issue of consolidated jurisdiction so that a single court would handle all the case files related to the Ayotzinapa case, since we currently have case files in Guerrero, Mexico City, the State of Mexico, and Tamaulipas. The final point is that the CNDH was going to follow up on the GIEI report so that the recommendations could be pursued jointly.”
From the very beginning, the CNDH showed a lack of sensitivity because it did not first inform the parents that it was going to issue a recommendation. What is unprecedented is that, in general terms, the recommendation protects the army, discredits the movement of the parents of the 43 and the organizations supporting them, and undermines the credibility of the GIEI’s experts. The CNDH was created to protect victims, but it prefers to defend the military.
Hilda Hernández, mother of student César Manuel González Hernández, said that the CNDH has not supported them on the winding 12-year journey to find the 43 young people. Instead of protecting the victims and their families, “it has violated the human rights of our children and of us. Why defend the military when there are so many lines of evidence pointing to them? There is a judge who ruled that those 800 pages do indeed exist, even though the military has not turned them over.”
He lamented the stance taken by the president of the CNDH because “her mother had an irreproachable record, having spent her entire life searching for her son and never finding him. We demand that the experts return because only international organizations have helped us bring attention to the investigations into this case.”
Don Emiliano Navarrete, father of student José Ángel Navarrete González, expressed his discontent with the CNDH and spoke about the experience that mothers and fathers have had with institutions that have failed to produce real results. “To be a representative of a human rights organization, you have to be born with a heart that wants to protect or defend the rights of Mexicans. But if you’re in that institution for the money, it doesn’t work out.
The father questioned the report recently released by the National Human Rights Commission, which exonerates the Mexican military of any involvement in the disappearance of his sons—despite the testimony of a young man who was at Cristina Hospital, where Captain Crespo told them that if they didn’t give their real names, they would never be found. “This testimony is highly credible because our young people were taken that night, and to this day we have not found them. Former Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos said that his ‘little soldiers’ had nothing to do with it and that no foreigner was going to come to interrogate them. That individual was detained by the United States and saved by ‘El Peje,’ who, at the end of his six-year term, turned against the Ministry of National Defense (Sedena).”
“We want to know where the Mexican government took our children. It’s unfortunate that we’re still fighting because the government doesn’t want to give us truth and justice. It’s pursuing lines of investigation without touching the army, but as long as we’re alive, we’ll keep pointing the finger at them, and we won’t give up our right to the truth. We have to fight as parents so that the truth comes to light and we know where they are,” said Don Emiliano.
The mothers and fathers, accompanied by the normalistas (teacher-training students,) will continue to speak out until the governments make progress with the lines of investigation. It’s unbelievable that, 12 years later, the investigations haven’t moved forward and, above all, we still don’t know where the 43 young people are.
Original text and photo published at Tlachinollan on September 25th, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.