MEXICO CITY -- Mexico's attorney general on Sunday followed through on a pledge to make public her office's investigative file for the disappearance of 43 students, releasing 85 volumes of material.
Attorney General Arely Gomez Gonzalez used her official Twitter account to give a link to the file on the agency's website. Mexico's top prosecutor earlier had allowed reporters to review the approximately 54,000 pages in their offices during recent weeks, but only with a pad of paper and a pen. Some names and other details are blacked out in the public version.
Making all 85 volumes plus appendices available online appears to meet an order by Mexico's National Transparency Institute.
The disappearance of the 43 students from a rural teachers' college on Sept. 26, 2014, has roiled the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto ever since. The students' families have refused to accept the government's version that local police in the city of Iguala detained the students and turned them over to a drug cartel that killed them and incinerated their bodies.
An international panel of experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights spent six months reviewing the government's investigation and found many flaws. It concluded that the government's story that the students were incinerated beyond identification at a garbage dump was physically impossible and said the official reports appeared to downplay the presence of federal police and troops near the areas where the students were seized.
The experts found that the army monitored the situation closely, but the army has refused to allow international investigators to interview its soldiers.
The same government transparency agency on Sunday said it had told the army that it must perform an exhaustive search and make public any communications with officials in the United States regarding the disappearance of the students.
The institute said the army had not yet thoroughly searched all of its entities in response to a public records request.
