User Reviews

A detailed narration, with interviews and documents, of the case about 43 students that having been under custody of policemen, disappeared in Mexico in 2014. Very important because this subject is an open wound and paradigmatic of a failed investigation by the government. The documentary begins by describing the background, family, school and circumstances of politically active rural Mexican students in the state of Guerrero that hijacked buses one night, because they wanted to go to a yearly protest in Mexico City. 43 of them disappeared after doing that. A few other students that had been with them survived to tell what happened until the time in which they were attacked by police forces (and insulted by soldiers.) Policemen took away their classmates and they were never to be seen again. After that, the documentary follows the exasperatingly slow investigation that followed both at state and federal levels (thus the title of the documentary "The Step of the Turtle"), leading by popular pressure to an unconvincing official "historic truth" from Presidente Peña Nieto's Attorney General which seems to have involved torturing witnesses and altering evidence to distort facts into a convenient hypothesis that could close the case and stop the search. The relatives of the disappeared ones seeked the help that they didn't receive from the government somewhere else. An intervention of an international group of experts advanced more the investigation in a few weeks than the government in years. The findings of this group were uncomfortable for the Peña Nieto administration. The strange behavior of the official investigators, their slow approach to clear up facts, and their unwillingness to recognize mistakes and to cooperate with other investigators, points to signs of a cover-up.