[JURIST] Mexico’s attorney general on Sunday released a 54,000-page file [text, in Spanish] detailing the Mexican government’s investigation into last year’s disappearance of 43 students. Attorney General Arely Gomez Gonzalez provided the partially-redacted document through Twitter [official account, in Spanish] following repeated calls by Mexico’s National Transparency Institute [advocacy website, in Spanish] for its release. After pouring through the documents, some people are questioning the official story, that the students were abducted by police, handed off to the Guerreros Unidos gang and incinerated in a landfill. AFP reported [text] that at least one gang member testified to nine or more of the students being executed elsewhere, lending some credence to the victims’ families’ ongoing skepticism of the official explanation.

While the problem of disappearances is widespread in Mexico, no particular case has drawn more attention than that of the 43 students. Earlier this month, in response to the students’ kidnapping, UN Rights Chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein urged [JURIST report] the Mexican government to cease using their military as law enforcement and replace the current force with well trained police officers. The month before, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced [JURIST report] that he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the 2014 disappearances. In February the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances published [JURIST report] a report indicating that authorities are often involved in enforcing the disappearances of its citizens. In January Amnesty International criticized [JURIST report] the government of Mexico for their “failed” investigation of the army in the “enforced disappearance” of the 43 students, claiming that it was incomplete and insufficient after DNA collected from a mass grave of burned bodies proved inconclusive at this time. AI’s report said 26,121 people were reported disappeared or missing between December 2006 and December 2012, but 40 percent of the cases were not investigated.