In late 2014, the Mexican government asked a group of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to provide technical assistance with its investigation into an attack on 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school. The experts delivered two devastating reports, which dismantled the government’s official investigation – especially its insistence that the students’ bodies had been burned in a funeral pyre.

For families of the students – farmers from impoverished Guerrero state – the IACHR’s intervention offered the opportunity to keep alive a case causing enormous embarrassment for the image-conscious government. The IACHR also “provided a complete picture of the shortcomings in the Mexican justice system”, says Santiago Aguirre, deputy director of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Centre, which worked with the students’ families.

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“What’s at stake is the functioning of the commission,” said the IACHR president, James Cavallaro. “The whole machine of international human rights: increasing visibility, making things international, providing a forum for victims, all that goes away.”

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