Relatives Persist in Pressuring Mexican Government to Continue Searching for 43 Missing Students One Year Later

More than a year has passed since the disappearance of 43 Mexican students believed to be killed by a gang, and it looks like justice would not be served anytime soon.

Hundreds of relatives and supporters of the students have protested on the streets of Mexico's capital on Saturday afternoon, demanding for information about what truly happened to the men, Al Jazeera reported. The Mexican government is being accused of withholding the truth, as neither information of the group's whereabouts not confirmation of their deaths has been give to the families.

"These are the people who are destroying our country," one of the protesters said, as quoted in Al Jazeera's report.

"I have seen repression, and the social demands have been growing because people are disappearing. Now we are demanding the government gives us the students back alive," a protester named Arturo Guerrero remarked, as reported by the news outlet.

The government said that the bodies of the students were burnt, making the identification of the remains an impossible task, Al Jazeera added. According to independent investigators, the students, who are from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Guerrero's southern state, were kidnapped while attempting to hijack buses in Iguala to travel to a place where a protest was taking place.

Prosecutors said that after arrests were made, police officials brought the group to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which then killed the students and burned their remains, The Rakyat Post reported. However, the official investigation met inquiries from independent experts at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, who claimed that there was no evidence of the students being incinerated in a funeral pyre at a garbage dump.

"Fortunately, the parents protests last year and legal action have helped discredit the government's version of events," said Bidulfo Rosales, an attorney for the families, as quoted in Al Jazeera's report.

Mexico's government is declining an order for a new inquiry, the news outlet noted. As a result, the families of those missing have tried to commission a new independent inquiry. But experts said that cooperation from the government is required to uncover the truth.

The case of the missing students is regarded as a part of Mexico's prevalent problems concerning organized crimes, Al Jazeera wrote. 20,000 individuals are reportedly missing across the country due to drug cartels, which are responsible for threatening journalists and having a huge hold in political, judicial, and security organizations.