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A federal judge has sentenced Santiago Mazari, called El carrete , to 20 years in prison for the crime of organized crime. Mazari is considered the leader of Los Rojos, a criminal group that commits crimes mainly in the State of Morelos. The Mexican authorities consider this gang and its main rival, Guerreros Unidos, the main responsible for the tragedy of September 26, 2014, when 43 students disappeared from the normal rural Ayotzinapa (Guerrero). The Prosecutor's Office confirmed this Sunday that after the ruling, El Carrete will continue in the Puente Grande prison, in Jalisco. Mazarí still faces three more criminal proceedings.
El Carrete was detained in August 2019 by soldiers and elements of the National Guard in the Sierra de Guerrero. Mazari had traveled to a remote community called Corral de Piedra to try to seal a deal with a community police officer. He was looking for partners for new routes between that state and Morelos. But negotiations with Juan Castillo's group, El Teniente, turned sour and a three-day shootout broke out. The reports of the confrontation reached the authorities, who began an operation that ended with the arrest. At the time of his arrest, Mazari was wounded by a gunshot. The army took him out of there by helicopter because of his dangerousness.
In the government narrative of the Ayotzinapa case, which is being reviewed today by the Morena Administration, Mazari asked the director of the rural community to send the youth to riot in the city of Iguala. That municipality was governed by José Luis Abarca, who has been accused of having ties to Guerreros Unidos, the antagonists of Los Rojos.
In February 2015, a series of blankets signed by El Carrete appeared in various locations in Morelos. In them, Mazari claimed that he had nothing to do with the case. Instead, he held a local businessman linked to Guerreros Unidos, Federico Figueroa, responsible. The drug trafficker claimed that the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto sought to assassinate him so that the truth about the case would never be known. He also invited the parents of the victims to meet him to "remove the blindfolds."
Relatives of the disappeared responded to the message a month later. “We ask you to please help us find the whereabouts of our children, because this bad government has not been serious with us. On the contrary, he has hurt us with his lies ”, said the message, which confirmed his willingness to carry out the interview, which was never publicly confirmed. The parents sought this route after rejecting the so-called historical truth of the Attorney General's Office: that the normalistas were murdered and cremated in the Cocula garbage dump.
The ties of drug lords like Mazari with local politicians are common. One of his hitmen bosses told the Attorney General's Office a few years ago that Los Rojos financed the campaign of several Morelos politicians in the 2015 municipal elections. On the EL Carrete payroll there were aspiring mayors from all parties: PRI, Verde, Social Democrat, PAN, Citizen Movement, Humanist and PRD. The deal was that, once in power, they would not hinder the criminals' work. In addition, they would pay the loan with the resources of the municipality. Some came to give between 100,000 and 500,000 pesos per month for the right of floor. The authorities believe that at least eleven mayors of the entity were linked to Los Rojos de El Carrete.
