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A team of independent investigators, probing the disappearance and alleged killing of 43 college students at the hands of criminal gangs in 2014 in Mexico, is set to dispute the government's account of what happened, reports said Friday.
[...] The international panel faced a sustained campaign of harassment, stonewalling and intimidation, The New York Times reported. The panel of experts alleged that the investigators endured planned attacks from Mexican news media and a refusal by the government to turn over documents or grant interviews with essential figures.
[...] The Mexican government had earlier concluded that the 43 students, who were in the city of Iguala in southwestern Mexico as part of a protest, were kidnapped by police officers working for criminal gangs, who then killed and incinerated them in a garbage dump of a nearby town.
The attorney general, who led the government probe, reportedly called the office's finding the "historic truth."
The independent investigators have opposed this version and maintained that the government's account of the events was based in part on confessions apparently extracted by torture. The panel also dismissed the theory that the students were burnt beyond identification at a rubbish dump as physically impossible.
Source: The International Business Times
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 25 2016, @05:12PM
What kind of sick society condones such violence? How could the murders of 49 people be met with such calculated indifference from their own society? Sicily has this culture of Omerta that empowers Mafia operations.
I think it's location.
Notice that usually, the most fucked-up cultures on Earth are close to the Equator. The closer, the worse they are. Middle eastern cultures are generally the worst (see ISIS, Wahhabism) but Latin American cultures are pretty close too. What do they have in common: they're close to the Equator. And so is Sicily. Notice that northern Italy is generally much more corruption-free and industrious than southern Italy, with Sicily, being south of most of the nation, is the worst part. The South and Texas in the US are more fucked-up than places to the north. Back in Europe, Spain was under a dictatorship until the mid-70s, and Greece was too. The most prosperous nations in Europe are generally the ones to the north: Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and then after the Iron Curtain fell, look at which countries really prospered when they weren't shackled by the Soviets: Czechia (their new name), Poland, Latvia, and Finland. Heck, Finland is now the envy of the world in many ways, and that place is downright frigid. Others have had much more trouble, namely Yugoslavia. What's the difference? Latvia and Finland are in the north, Yugoslavia is in the south.
There must be something about being close to the Equator that makes people crazy.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday April 25 2016, @06:14PM
Somewhat relatedly: North-South divide [wikipedia.org]
And your observations are only true recently. Back in the day, Rome, Byzantium, Alexander the Great, Persia, various civilizations in the fertile crescent...would the most recent example of a really successful civilization in that area be the Ottoman Empire? Which was broken up at the end of WWI.
Yeah yeah, my cultural biases are showing :/
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"