Drug trafficker Santiago Mazari Hernández, alias El Carrete, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the crime of organized crime, as reported this Sunday by the Attorney General's Office (FGR) of Mexico.
Mazari is considered the leader of the Los Rojos criminal group, one of the main criminal organizations in the south of that country. The Mexican authorities had identified him as " one of the main generators of violence in Guerrero and Morelos ."
The now sentenced will continue in the Federal Center for Social Readaptation No. 2 Occidente, located in Puente Grande, Jalisco. He is also charged with accusations of organized crime, crimes against health (drug trafficking) and kidnapping.
After the FGR established the evidence, the district judge in the state of Jalisco issued the sentence of 20 years in prison.
El Carrete is also being investigated for its possible participation in the disappearance of the 43 normalista students from Ayotzinapa, which occurred on September 26, 2014.
[Case of the 43 from Ayotzinapa: new investigation identifies the remains of one of the missing students in Mexico]
Both Los Rojos and their main rival, Guerreros Unidos, are considered the gangs responsible for this tragedy, in which officials and police under investigation also participated.
An early hypothesis of the investigation claimed that Mazari ordered the normalistas to go from Ayotzinapa to Iguala to generate riots against the then mayor, currently under investigation for links to drug trafficking, but the theory was discarded shortly after and there is no evidence to support it.
Relatives of the 43 from Ayotzinapa acknowledge progress in the investigation after the meeting with President AMLO
July 10, 202000: 44Other elements of that initial investigation, which the previous government called the "historical truth", have been dismantled as wrong by international experts.
The current government, of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reopened the investigation to try to discover the whereabouts of the 43.
Los Rojos are dedicated to the production and transfer of opium derived from the poppy plant, both in the state of Guerrero and in Morelos.
Although in 2015, in a series of banners signed by El Carrete that appeared in various places in Morelos, he claimed that he had nothing to do with the case and held the local businessman linked to Guerreros Unidos, Federico Figueroa, responsible.
This is the first sentence against the leader of Los Rojos, who was arrested on August 1, 2019 in the municipality of Leonardo Bravo, in the state of Guerrero. At the time of his arrest, Mazari was wounded by a gunshot and the Army took him out of the mountains in a helicopter.
Mazari Hernández was found guilty of participating in an organized crime scheme for the purpose of distributing cocaine hydrochloride from its operations center in Morelos to the rest of the country.
The also called Señor de los Caballos , born in San Gabriel Las Palmas, Amacuzac, Morelos, has been persecuted since 2009 by the Army and Navy, who failed in their attempts to stop him up to four times.
Several politicians were linked to El Carrete . A couple of years ago, two chiefs of the Los Rojos cartel alleged gave money to 11 mayors of Morelos, from eight parties, for their campaigns in exchange for protecting them.
Thus, El Carrete supported the municipal president of Jojutla for the Social Democratic Party (PSD) with one million pesos, to finance his campaign, according to one of the capos.
Mexican authorities identify the remains of one of the 43 Ayotzinapa students
July 7, 202000: 54Six years after the tragedy that shook Mexico
September marks the sixth anniversary of one of the human rights violations in recent history that has most shaken Mexico. And in recent weeks the pieces of the puzzle to find the whereabouts of students have moved more than in previous months.
The parents of the young people met a month ago with López Obrador. They assured that the president shared relevant information about the case .
Days before, the Mexican prosecutor's office announced the identification of the skeletal remains of Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre, one of the missing students.
"Without a doubt it is a first-instance advance in the investigation," said Omar Gómez Trejo, prosecutor of the special unit in the Ayotzinapa case.
Gómez Trejo stressed that with this finding he "closes with the narrative of a lie" that the previous government, chaired by Enrique Peña Nieto, promoted as a supposed "historical truth": that the 43 missing youths had been burned alive in a garbage dump and near a river.
The ravine was not even reviewed by previous authorities, according to Gómez Trejo.
"The case is still open," said the prosecutor for the case, who promised to continue investigating until "the right to justice" of the relatives is guaranteed.
[This is how 'El Marro' fell: helicopters and elite forces to catch the man who did not sleep two nights in the same house]
The announcement of the discovery of the remains of the young normalista, the most recent advance since the courts ordered to redo the investigation on the night of Iguala, two years ago, and since the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador created, in December 2018, a special truth commission to clarify the case.
In recent weeks, nearly 50 new arrest warrants have also been announced for those allegedly responsible, including Tomás Zerón, the man who headed the prosecutor's investigation unit and who is now accused of tampering with evidence and fabricating a false report on the alleged whereabouts of the youth.
The authorities also detained two officials from the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) in July, accused of torturing suspects during the investigations into the 43 missing students.
With information from Efe, El País and Reforma.
