The University of Arkansas is observing International Education Week through Friday. For a decade, part of that observation has included a public lecture from a guest brought to the U of A by the campus chapter of the Scholars at Risk Network.
This year, Oscar Gomez, a former Mexican special prosecutor, delivered that talk. Gomez was the lead prosecutor of the Special Unit for Investigation and Litigation of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in 2014. He's also worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico. He now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Late last week, Oscar Gomez and Luis Restrepo, a professor of world languages at the U of A and co-chair of the campus Scholars at Risk committee, came to the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio. Oscar Gomez says working as a lawyer in human rights cases is a special kind of work.
Gomez: Immediately you have these kind of cases, such as torture. You need to rescue like any other second memory and probably witness about that human rights violation. And also you need to rescue the victim testimony. And that's probably the ways to start working a good case on torture. And then obviously there are several medical and psychological studies that you need to do. For example, there's guidelines and there's a main instrument even started internationally using, which is the Istanbul Protocol, which helps to document this kind of human rights violations by a medical or psychological doing a questionnaire, a long, long questionnaire to the victims.
And then you can rescue, for example, the place. You can rescue the time. You can rescue all the factors and circumstances around that case to build a strong case.
And as you know, I work in the Ayotzinapa case, and the first version that the state provided to resolve the case, supposedly resolve the case, they call it the “historical truth.” But the historical truth was based on torture of several people who were detained days after the disappearance of the students. And they create this version torturing these people in several facilities of the state.
And, for example, when I arrived in the investigation years later — five years later, six years later — the facility was not in the place that we were supposed to find it, because that place was completely demolished by the state. So we rebuilt that place by maps, by doing architectural analysis of the places, by photographs, press releases, conferences by the years later, because they used those facilities to do press conferences.
So we got the fortune to gather during the investigation 50 videos that reflect torture, including these people that they used to create this version. So we rebuilt all the scenario around that and also have the witnesses of these victims. So that helps a lot to connect the objective data with the testimony of the victims. So that's why I recall a lot, every time that I can, say it's important to work with the victims.
It's hard work. It takes a team. It needs to require special skills to do these kind of things. Yes. And also the pretending. And probably in a golden perspective, try to find the truth, because human rights violations means that: find the truth about what happened, why they did it. So what are the reasons, and recreate also the context around these kind of cases.
Kellams: And of course, as you mentioned, you're often working in situations where it behooves somebody to erase the evidence. So you're working against that.
Gomez: That's the main goal too. And also, for example, the forced disappearance, which is a case where the person, in one moment, does not exist. Just disappeared. And also the other objective of that crime committed by the perpetrators is erase, destroy any evidence that could lead you to investigate these people. So that's why they call it the perfect crime. Because it's hard to find evidence. In my experience, it's always hard to find these evidences because always the time — the time always plays a role in these kind of crimes too. But you can find evidences to recreate the cases, but that's part of the objective, that you have to try to get seconds to any minute to recreate the whole crime around.
Kellams: It's interesting because it sounds like this is work that would take both patience, but you're also working against the clock. So you're having to sort of balance that.
Gomez: Yes. You need to have a clear idea and a clear goal what you want to get from there. And sometimes the voices of the victims lead you or take you to those goals. For example, the families of the 43 students always told me when I was working as a prosecutor, “Omar, we need to know where are our kids. So we need to find them.” So that's why we work a lot on search for the students. And also, “We need to find out why this happened to our kids.” So that was the other part.
So if you see that as like a symbiosis, it's like you find the truth to tell the families and the relatives where are the students, but also what happened to them and why.
Kellams: Scholars at Risk has been bringing individuals onto the university campus for at least 10 years, correct. Why? What's the value that a community can have by hearing from people like Omar?
Restrepo: Yes, Kyle. Thank you for having us. We have been bringing speakers that have participated in Scholars at Risk, which is an international organization that supports academic freedom worldwide and works with scholars and practitioners that had to flee their countries because of the work they do. We do these presentations, and you have been helping us here in Ozarks At Large with documenting this during International Education Week, which is a national celebration of international education.
We felt that the celebration was really beautiful — to enjoy the different customs, the different foods, the diversity, points of view that international education brings to Arkansas and to all of us. It enriches our lives. But we felt that we needed to discuss real issues of what it means to be a scholar and to speak to power — the truth. Because university students everywhere in the country are the ones that really see the injustices that are indicated and are willing to go and talk about it. And we have seen this in this country with Palestine and other protests in the 1960s. So the courage of the college students, we hope that they continue with that spirit, because that's one of the missions that we have: to learn the injustices. When you have the privilege of having a college education, or to be enlightened of the inequities in the world, and not do anything about it — that's a hard thing to do.
Kellams: When you leave the Bay Area and you come half a continent across the country, what benefits do you think there can be from talking to an audience two time zones away?
Gomez: I believe in wanting, which is we need to talk about these, unfortunately, hard crimes. We need to let them know. And also the student community — about, for example, the 43 students — because those 43 students were young. They were probably the people that we see today at the university. And the decision of the people who disappeared, which was part of the state, they just take away the lives. They just take away that dream that you have as a student to be someone in life. So that's probably the connection. That's why I do this.
It's like a pedagogic exercise to share — not my story — share the story about this case that I worked several years, because I work in this case like eight years. Since it happened, the disappearance, I was working in Mexico. So immediately I connect with the case and immediately caught my attention because we supposedly live in a democracy in Mexico. And one night 43 students went — just disappeared. So that's not what happens in a democracy. So that's why probably I just hooked up to that case and started working on it.
Kellams: Forty-three students, 43 families, extended families, ruined lives, changed forever. And often part of the reason that these crimes happen is to try to quiet people in the future as well. So there's this responsibility also to not let — I don't know, this is a trite way to say — but not let people get away with this.
Gomez: Yeah, that's why justice needs to be used to send a message to the society, also to the perpetrators: this is not what we let you do. But unfortunately, in Mexico, like I said at the origin of this conversation, they created a false version. So the state in the first days after the disappearance, they show us that they don't like the truth. They don't like to find a good investigation. They tortured. They planted evidence. They did some other things even that the Constitution and the law doesn't let happen. They did it.
So the state showed that they like to lie, or they wanted to lie, just to keep a quiet Mexico, keeping under the voice of Mexicans and the families. The dignity of the families, and also the society, reacted very positive because immediately they just took the streets. And that created oppression of the state. And that obviously had results about future investigation groups that arrived in Mexico to conduct and help the authorities to conduct investigations.
Kellams: Yes. And unfortunately there are cases like this in countries all over the world, all over the world. Do you have contact with attorneys and human rights defenders around the world that might be working on other cases?
Gomez: Yeah. I mean, in Mexico. But also I started working in an NGO in San Francisco that is giving me the opportunity to work in Central America. And, I don't know, I have like 20 years, probably more years of experience working in these kind of cases. And immediately you see a pattern. So this is happening also in other countries. Yes. And this is the way the authors try to cover up or change the version of these cases.
Yes. This is, for example, I'm working on El Salvador. You have a huge leader, very famous one. He's being famous about to put us a picture about this person called CECOT. And you see the images, and they're very hard to see. You see a lot of people with tattoos and white clothes, always controlled by authorities. But unfortunately this is a false version of what is really happening in El Salvador.
This is like the beautiful version of that torture, that imprisoned persons, people. Unfortunately, the prisons around the country — not CECOT, which is the main one supposedly — the other cases are completely packed of people, and the human rights violations happening in those other places are completely horrible and tremendous. Hard to believe that there's dignity in people, even. They disappear because immediately they were detained. Nobody knows about them. Only the state says, yes, he's living here.
But we know cases about the family looking for their kids, for their relatives. They just receive a notice saying, no, he passed away six months ago. You need to go to the public cemetery to recover the body. So unfortunately this is happening a lot now in El Salvador. And, like we say, politicians love to lie because probably truth is more like moral, ethical thing, not for a politician.
Kellams: You know, we don't live in — I mean, we're speaking not in a studio in Mexico or El Salvador or Sudan or any of the other countries where we know human rights violations are happening. Are there things that we can do from Fayetteville or Des Moines or Boise?
Gomez: Yes. I mean, it's obviously whatever imagination, whatever creativity. And also students, academic community, and also the society — you have a voice to rise, to say stop doing this in any way that you choose. It will be great to support.
Unfortunately, like I say, in these cases, always you find a victim, which is probably a person who is in prison or is disappeared. But also you will find a relative that is looking to find justice but also to find that relative, that family member, to return to their places. And that's probably the main thing that we need to feel, because this is empathy. This is solidarity. This is the kind of values that probably we need to rescue as a society now, here in the U.S., here in other countries.
Kellams: Where can people find out more about Scholars at Risk?
Restrepo: They can go online. I think it's — just search scholarsatrisk.org is based in New York University, but it's an international organization. So they have lists of the scholars that are seeking placement, also a series of lectures that they can have. They also publish an annual state of the academic freedom worldwide, the incidents in academic freedom. So they do that report and that's open as well. And the U of A is one of the members of this network.
Kellams: Finally, very important work, very emotionally taxing work. You're working with families and there's a huge responsibility to help them find out. How do you make sure you take care of yourself?
Gomez: Well, that's probably something that you learn by the years. It's not that I just block that reality and it does not affect me, but I don't know. I know how to work with that. So thanks to the program of Scholars at Risk, for example. That's why I'm in the U.S. For safety reasons I needed to leave Mexico. And that time — I got three years now living in the U.S. — gives me the opportunity to rebuild that certainty and security that you lost. Because when you work with these kind of cases, the sacrifice that you as a person is a lot. Even you sacrifice the time with your family, your life.
But yes, I mean, receiving support and finding another — you know — the sense that it gives you structure in your person. And that means probably a lot of exercise, a lot of swimming pools. You do these kind of things like playing softball to distract and change your way. But also I think the main thing is build a barrier of like a wall between what is your work, which is your reality, and also which is your feelings, yourself, your family, your special love world.
Oscar Gomez was the lead prosecutor of the Special Unit for Investigation and Litigation of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in 2014, and he was this year's Scholars at Risk speaker at the University of Arkansas. Also part of our discussion, Luis Restrepo, a professor of world languages at the University of Arkansas and a co-chair of the U of A Scholars at Risk committee. Our conversation was recorded at the Carver Center for Public Radio late last week.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
