Former Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam was sentenced to preventative detention in the Norte Prison on Saturday in the explosive trial over his alleged role in the coverup of the murder and disappearance of 43 teachers from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014.
Murillo stands accused of concealing evidence and being complicit in serious human rights violations, including torture, in a case which shocked domestic audiences and international observers alike with the extent of the corruption revealed. His arrest came hours after publication of the findings of a truth commission – established as one of the first acts of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador upon taking power in 2018 – found the massacre to be a state-sponsored crime.
While Mexico’s former ‘top cop’ is just the first to face the music for his alleged role in the 2014 killing and disappearance of 43 teachers in Ayotzinapa, he wasn’t the last – his arrest came just hours before a judge issued arrest warrants for 83 military commanders, cops, cartel members, and local officials suspected to have participated in the slayings, disappearances, and subsequent cover-up.
Murillo is undoubtedly the most high-profile politician to face charges, however.
Murillo rose to prominence after being elected governor of Hidalgo in 1993 under the banner of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Five years later, he was appointed undersecretary of public security. In 2006, he would go on to be elected senator and take the reins of the PRI as the party’s secretary general. In 2012, Murillo was appointed attorney general by then-President Enrique Peña Nieto.
But his political career came crashing down in 2014, following his mishandling of the Ayotzinapa massacre. The beginning of the end most likely came in the aftermath of the slayings, on November 7, when Murillo abruptly departed from a news conference after dismissively telling journalists: “ya me cansé.” Translation: he’s “had enough.”
Mexico Chronicle of Disbelief
© AP Photo / Marco Ugarte
The hashtag #YaMeCanse quickly emerged as a rallying cry in protests which cropped up across the country. Murillo stepped down as attorney general in 2015, and it wasn’t until Mexico’s current president took office and proposed a truth commission that serious institutional momentum started to gather behind the movement for justice for the disappeared.
The 43 teachers in question had been returning from a protest when their buses were stopped and police opened fire on them. Murillo’s insistence (in what he infamously described as the “historical truth”) that the killings were the work of local drug gangs, and that their bodies were subsequently incarcerated at a dump, was debunked by the truth commission this week.
The timing of Murillo’s arrest, coming just hours after the report was published, suggests the findings are most likely what led to the charges of “altering facts and circumstances to establish a false conclusion” which the former top cop now finds himself facing. Murillo’s next hearing is scheduled for August 24.