Mexico says students’ disappearance ‘Crime of State’

(CNN) - "Where are our children?"

The question has been asked thousands of times, but the answer remains elusive. For the last eight years, the parents of 43 missing college students have been asking the same question.

They have marched around Mexico, met with top Mexican government officials, including President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who welcomed them at Mexico's national palace, the Presidential Mansion.

At one point, they even commandeered toll plazas in a desperate effort to remind a forgetting nation that their children were still missing.

It's been almost eight years since 43 students from a rural teacher's college in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero went missing, and the whereabouts of most of them remains a mystery, except for three who were confirmed dead after small bone fragments were identified thanks to DNA testing.

A report unveiled by Mexico's Undersecretary for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas, who led a truth commission, provided details, but no definitive answer.

Encinas said the disappearance constitutes a "Crime of the State."

Adding meaning to the word, Encinas spoke that criminal gangs and Mexican security were involved and complicit. He also stated that federal and state authorities looked the other way and were negligent, even though they knew what was happening.

Still, there is no answer to the only question that matters to parents, "Where are our children?"

Through a human rights group, the parents stated that they "have decided to deeply analyze the commission's report...before making their reaction public."

A month after the students went missing, Emiliano Navarrete told us his son, Jose Angel, called him on the night he disappeared to let him know the students were being shot at by the police.

By the time we met him again a year later, the government's version that the students were killed, and their bodies burned at a landfill has been discredited by an independent group of forensic experts.

When we met again, he was still clinging to the hope of finding his son alive.

"Believe me, I will bring him back," Navarrete hopes.

Other parents have told us over the years that they aren't hoping for justice to be done anymore.

"We just want to be able to give our children a proper burial," a parent of one of the missing students said.