Bangladesh’s leading production company and content provider Crown Entertainment has decided to produce a film titled ‘Mexican Mystery’, which is based on the true story of 43 girl students, who went missing in Mexico in 2014.
Tajul Islam, Deputy CEO of the company in a Facebook status wrote:
A film titled ‘Mexica Mystery’, based on the bone-chilling true story, will be jointly produced by Crown Entertainment and a foreign production company, preferably Spanish or Mexican.
About the background of the #Mexican_Mystery, Tajul Islam wrote:
“Back in September 2014, 43 girl students mysteriously disappeared in southwestern Mexico. Later it was revealed that these girls were abducted by a Mexican crime boss with the help of deputy chief of police. The students had made the deadly mistake of commandeering several buses in order to drive to Mexico City for a protest. Now it is found that those buses were part of a drug-running operation that would carry huge cargo of heroin across the US border, and the students had accidently stolen the entire consignment.
“On September 26, 2014 the girls were arrested. These students later were passed to the drug cartel where 43 girls were tortured, killed and buried on clandestine grave site. Aside from a few bone fragments, the bodies of the students have never been found.
“Based on this true story, Crown Entertainment is going to produce a feature film titled ‘Mexican Mystery’. We are looking for jointly producing this film with Spanish or Mexican production company. This film will be jointly directed by Bangladeshi filmmaker Apurba Rana and a foreign film director”.
When contacted, Tajul Islam told this correspondent that Crown Entertainment and its affiliate concern Crown Creations already are working on a number of web-films and web-series for several international OTT platforms. They were shocked reading the report about the mysterious disappearances of 43 girl students in Mexico.
According to media reports, the students were all enrolled at the Rural Teachers College in the nearby town of Ayotzinapa, and so they became known as the Ayotzinapa 43. The College is considered a bastion of leftist activism and on the night of the disappearance more than 100 students had been making their way to the nation’s capital. There they planned to take part in demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco. Most of the student teachers were in their early twenties, but the youngest—Jose Angel Navarrete, known as Pepe to his friends—was just 18 years old.
The mass kidnapping in Iguala would spark protests across Mexico. The previous government originally put forward a theory—now largely discredited—that the students’ bodies had been burned in a trash dump on the outskirts of Iguala. In the wake of the new evidence, the young men’s families are demanding fresh searches for the bodies and additional evidence to identify all of those involved.
Stephanie Brewer, the Mexico director at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the new evidence shows how often in Mexico “organized crime is comprised of both state and non-state actors.”
Brewer pointed to both “state tolerance and collusion—seen in this case in its most brutal and extreme form, where corrupt police are carrying out the gravest human rights violations that exist.”
Although Salgado is already incarcerated for his alleged role in the massacre, López was arrested and then released over an apparent failure of due process, and remains at large.
Although not specifically mentioned in the text messages, allegations have previously surfaced that Mexico’s military was also involved in the disappearances.
A leading newspaper, La Reforma, published leaked testimony earlier this year that suggested army officers based in Iguala had also worked with the Guerreros Unidos to round up some of the students as well as other enemies of the cartel who were in the town on the night of Sept. 26.
The exchanges between the cop and the capo in Iguala were originally intercepted by the army, which has taken some seven years to release them. That has led to criticism, including from the families of the missing students, that the army is not being transparent despite a presidential commission having been established with universal jurisdiction over the case.
“The army hides information because it’s in their best interest to do so,” said a high-ranking Mexican police commander who agreed to speak to The Daily Beast only under the condition of anonymity. “The whole world knows that the army controls the drug trade [in that part of Mexico.]”
The Reforma report indicated that, in addition to the 43 students, the army had participated in the abduction of some 30 cartel rivals to Guerreros Unidos that same night.
“The army destroys anyone or anything that gets in their way,” the commander said. “They work with organized crime to protect their own objectives.”
WOLA’s Brewer also pointed to the Mexican military’s lack of cooperation in the case.
“The Mexican army had these wiretaps [and so] had knowledge about the facts that it was not sharing,” Brewer said.
“This raises questions about why and how the army obtained this information, and what obstacles still need to be overcome to be sure that the army is in fact sharing its information with those in charge of investigating the case.”
The DEA’s Vigil said it is “unconscionable” that so many of the cartel members, police and military officers involved in the crime have yet to be punished.
“Mexico continues to wonder why violence persists unabated. They don’t understand that no consequence for criminal actions translates to more impunity.”
Unfortunately, the tragedy of Iguala is far from an isolated incident. More than 93,000 people have gone missing during Mexico’s long drug war—and more than 90 percent of those cases have never been solved, according to Brewer, who is helping WOLA push the Mexican government for reforms in its treatment of missing persons.
