Nearly one year after 43 college students disappeared, and six months after independent investigators first called the Mexican government's account into question, President Enrique Peña Nieto announced a meeting with the students' grieving families slated for Sept. 24.
"The Office of the President of the Republic will show its commitment to providing support to victims, direct and indirect, and will continue the investigation until it clears up the incident," Mexico's secretariat of the interior said in a statement, adding "Mexico will continue making efforts aimed at learning the truth and having justice in the Ayotzinapa case."
Peña Nieto agreed to the meeting after a United Nations-sanctioned investigation found irregularities in former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam's initial investigation last September; first in Karam alleging that police stopped a planned protest in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico and later by suggesting police mistook students for gang members. The Sept. 26 shootout left six dead - including three Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School students - and 43 other youths missing.
According to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, neither story is plausible.
The IACHR's report disputes two key findings: how their bodies were disposed and whether students maneuvered four buses instead of five. Government officials originally said Guerrero Unidos drug cartel members murdered the boys and burned their remains on the outskirts of Cocula.
A Peruvian fire expert hired by the IACHR concluded that "no evidence exists to support the theory based on the statements that the 43 bodies were cremated." Evidence of a fifth bus, which local officials never examined as part of the crime scene, led investigators to believe the students may have inadvertently take a bus filled with narcotics.
President Peña Nieto instructed his government to incorporate newfound research into a second investigation headed by current attorney general Arely Gómez González. Last week, Gómez González met with IACHR officials, promising to address their concerns.
The Mexican government will "review the recommendations of the report released Sunday by the collegial body of technical assistance and continue working together in the investigation of the case," according to a statement released by the attorney general.
IACHR experts will attend the Sept. 24 meeting alongside the family members. For mothers and fathers of the missing, it will be their first interaction with Peña Nieto since last October when the president promised a "renewed search plan" and better support for relatives of the missing.