Mexico's National Human Rights Commission is questioning the government's official version of what happened to 43 missing college students who investigators say were killed and incinerated last September.
The commission, in a report issued Thursday, said Mexican authorities failed to follow lines of investigation and neglected the needs of the victims to an extent that constitutes violations of human rights.
The report lists key people and evidence — including a cellphone message from one student after he was kidnapped — that were never pursued in the Sept. 26 attacks in the southern city of Iguala.
It says the students' families never received proper medical and psychological support and still live amid the same crime and insecurity that led to the disappearances, which involved a drug cartel working with local police.
"Mexico is not the same after Iguala," Commission President Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez told a news conference. "This is not a time to be silent or to forget."
The teachers college students from the state of Guerrero disappeared Sept. 26 while commandeering transit buses for a protest in Mexico City. Mexico's attorney general's office says the students were arrested by local police and handed over to a drug cartel, which killed and incinerated them in a garbage dump.
The case has caused national protests and outrage worldwide over the collusion between criminals and authorities that led to the disappearances. Federal investigators have only identified one of the missing students in the charred remains they say were found at the garbage dump.
The other remains and ashes carried no identifiable DNA.
The report questions almost all the evidence and official versions of what happened. It says the omissions are preventing authorities from bringing the case to justice and explaining to parents what happened to their sons, most from poor rural families who saw a teacher's college education as a means of upward mobility.
Among other things, the report says investigators have never established if the remains found at the garbage dump are human or animal. It urges authorities to question the military units stationed in Iguala during the attacks and to glean more information from the Federal Police about their role that night. The report also asks the Defense Department to name any missing students who were also members of the military, as local media reports have claimed.
It also calls on authorities to interview school officials about who organized the student trip to hijack buses and why only first-year students were sent.
"The time to act is now to give meaning to the pain, suffering and indignation that this case has generated," Gonzalez said.