MEXICO CITY: The Mexican government apologized Tuesday to the families of two students shot dead in 2010 by army soldiers who tried to cover up the crime by planting guns beside the youths.
Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, ages 23 and 24, were killed when a shootout between the army and a drug gang spilled onto their university campus just as they were leaving the library late on the night of March 19, 2010.
Rather than admit they had killed two innocent graduate students in engineering, the authorities accused them of being gang members and planted guns next to their bodies.
“In the name of the Mexican state, I offer you a public apology... for the loss of your sons’ lives,“ Interior Minister Olga Sanchez told the men’s parents at a ceremony in the northern city of Monterrey, where the men studied at the Institute of Technology and Higher Education.
It is the latest such gesture under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an anti-establishment leftist who took office in December promising a clean break with Mexico’s past of corruption and violence.
Two weeks ago, the governor of Veracruz state, a Lopez Obrador ally, publicly apologized to the families of five young friends who were killed in 2016 when corrupt police detained them and handed them over to drug cartel hitmen.
The federal government has also opened a new investigation into a similar case, the disappearance of 43 students in the southern state of Guerrero in 2014 that drew international condemnation.
And it has, together with the Guerrero state government, publicly apologized and launched a plan to make amends to families of victims of the “dirty war” the government waged on leftist activists in the 1960s and 70s. — AFP
