Mexico allegedly used beatings and torture to extract confessions out of municipal police officers accused in the case of 43 missing student teachers whose disappearances led to mass protests around the country.  At the very least, it suggests the prosecution of these officers is compromised, assuming that the theory of the case is even correct.

The state’s version of events has the mayor of Iguala town in Guerrero state ordering his police to arrest 43 students from a Leftist teachers’ college in order to stop them from protesting at an event featuring the mayor’s wife.  Witnesses saw officers bundling the students into the backs of police vans.  The cops then allegedly turned the students over to the local drug gang, which murdered the 43, burned their bodies, and dumped what was left into a river.  An Austrian lad matched DNA from one set of remains to samples provided by one of the families. 

Investigative reporters with the Mexican magazine Proceso obtained medical records that showed more than two dozen municipal police officers from the towns of Iguala and Cocula were beaten, given electric shocks and “psychologically tortured” to get them to confess.  One 20-year old police officer corroborated the documents with his own personal account of being beaten.  The others suffered busted lips, extensive bruising, and electric shocks at the hands of “large men dressed in black and wearing hoods”.  One, who maintains he doesn’t know where the students are buried, asked his public defender to complain to the National Commission of Human Rights.

The sister of one of the tortured officers came to the police station to visit the man, only to be horrified at his appearance.  “I could only speak with him for three minutes,” said Aracely Mota.  “He told me they had beat him a lot and they had subjected him to electric shocks.  His face was swollen.  Why did they hit him?  To make him confess to something he didn't do?”

The same magazine had earlier reported that drug gang members got the same treatment to make them confess to the deaths of the 43.  Confessions obtained via torture are inadmissible as evidence in Mexico’s courts of law. 

The doubts over the confessions will no doubt feed the mistrust that family members of the 43 and their supporters have for the Mexican government.  Many already don’t believe the government’s version of events, in a country where the innocent have been tortured or killed to protect the guilty-but-well-connected.