Normalists protest in front of the FGR this Thursday.Sáshenka Gutiérrez / EFE
Months pass and the investigation of the
Ayotzinapa case
continues to be shrouded in fog and rumors, oblivious to concrete progress, sustained by an undeniable success: the identification of the remains of two of the 43 disappeared students, Christian Rodríguez and Jhosivani Guerrero, this year and last. . With these two, there are three students identified in total, although the remains of the first, Alexander Mora, were found in strange circumstances in 2014 and have become, over the years, the image of the concealment orchestrated by the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
Seven years have passed since the attack, slightly less than three since the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, promised to do justice to the families. If the identifications represent the good work of the investigators, the scarce clarity about what happened during the attacks, on the night of September 26 and early in the morning of September 27, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero, illustrates their difficulties. It is beginning to be known what did not happen, but not what happened, a situation that tends the families of the 43. On Thursday, a group protested in front of the headquarters of the Prosecutor's Office, demanding concrete progress. This Friday, after a meeting with López Obrador prior to the seventh anniversary of the attack, his lawyer, Vidulfo Rosales, said: "We recognize that there is progress, but there are obstacles presented by institutions such as the Prosecutor's Office or the Ministry of Defense."
The slowness of the Attorney General's Office (FGR) to arrest some of those involved angers mothers and fathers of the 43, who in recent months have lost two of their members, Saúl Bruno García and Bernardo Campos, parents of two of the students. The FGR has about thirty arrests pending, including that of Tomás Zerón, head of the investigators during the first stage of the investigation, today considered the architect of a cover built on the basis of torture. At a press conference after the meeting with the families, the prosecutor in the case, Omar Gómez, explained that the National Intelligence Center had given them 40 videos showing their predecessors torturing detainees in the case. Zerón takes refuge in Israel, leaving the ball on the roofs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the FGR,that in months they have not reported any progress in the delivery of the former official.
The 'Ayotzinapa case' advances between identifications and gaps in the reconstruction of the attack
Mexico pursues the truth of the 'Ayotzinapa case' in the Carnicería ravine
The Mexican Army refuses to collaborate in the investigation of the 'Ayotzinapa case'
It has not been an easy task for the current researchers, who, far from starting their work from scratch, did it several meters under the floor of the traps built by the previous regime.
This same week, in a visit to the place where the remains of Rodríguez and Guerrero were found, the Carnicería ravine, the prosecutor Gómez pointed out what for him is an incontrovertible fact.
The record of the discovery of Alexander Mora's bones is false, a fact that they assumed, but which they can now prove with documents and testimonies.
Controversial from the beginning, the discovery of Mora's remains closed the puzzle of the previous Administration's narrative. The Government, represented at the time by the prosecutor, Jesús Murillo Karam, and Zerón himself, pointed out that the criminal group Guerreros Unidos attacked the boys in collusion with local police. According to officials, the attackers killed and burned the boys in the garbage dump in the neighboring town of Cocula and dumped the remains into a nearby river.
In October 2014, Mora's remains were conveniently found in that river. At that time, the Prosecutor's Office worked side by side with the Argentine forensic anthropology team, at the request of the families of the 43. But just on the day that Mora's bones allegedly appeared in the river, the Argentine anthropologists were detained. They did not let them pass. No one other than Zerón or members of his team witnessed the finding, based on a record that today is known to be false.
The deception of the river scene raises many questions.
If the bones weren't in the river, who put them there?
Why?
Where did they kill Mora then?
Did they kill the others?
Where how?
And of course the rest of the pieces of the old puzzle remain in limbo, both those that made it up, for example the great homicidal bonfire of the garbage dump, and those that were left out, the importance of settings and actors, and so on.
Waiting for the Army
Knowledgeable like few of the investigations carried out by the prosecutor Gómez, by the presidential commission that is dedicated to the case, under the command of the Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, and by the group of investigators sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IACHR, the Rosales lawyer has also pointed to the Army. Several sources close to the investigation groups mentioned above point out that the next turnaround in the case will have to do precisely with the Ministry of Defense.
One of the sources, close to the IACHR group of experts, explains that the presence of the military on the night of the events is greater and deeper than what was known up to now. Since May, members of the IACHR group and the presidential commission have visited military barracks and warehouses in Iguala, Chilpancingo, and Acapulco, gathering information on military activities during the attack, before and after. The conclusion is that the military had real-time information about the attack and that they were in more scenarios than they initially recognized, information that they withheld.
This source indicates that the matter is very serious. "If you - in reference to the military - have information on who took the students and where, you have the obligation to tell the PGR [old prosecutor's office]," he says, "that's why it's very relevant." Doubt is the reason for concealment. Is it a military routine, hide by default? From a genuine attitude of covering up data? From a combination of both? Captain José Martínez Crespo, the highest ranking military officer imprisoned for crimes related to the case, has been accused of allegedly having links with Guerreros Unidos. Witnesses from the Prosecutor's Office also point to other soldiers from the battalion of collaborating with the criminal group.
Until now, the Army has maintained that soldiers from the Iguala barracks went to one of the places of the attack, the corner of Juan N. Álvarez and Periférico streets, after the first ambush, orchestrated mainly by Iguala police.
He has also recognized that an intelligence element from the barracks was in the other scene of the attack in the town, the bridge in front of the Palace of Justice.
And that the first group, under the command of Captain Crespo, went to the stage of the Palace of Justice after the attack.
Investigators now know that there was another group of soldiers patrolling Iguala during the attack, under the command of another soldier with a higher rank than Crespo.
Huitzuco and Los Tilos
Beyond the coup that the arrest and arrival of Tomás Zerón in Mexico would entail, the number of arrest warrants pending prosecution and execution by the FGR is immense. At this Friday's meeting with López Obrador, the families protested this and even pointed to the failed operation to arrest Juan Salgado Guzmán, alias El Indio or El Caderas, on Wednesday in the State of Mexico. When they tried to arrest El Caderas, an alleged member of Guerreros Unidos, agents of the FGR killed him, allegedly responding to an attack by the former.
Sources close to the investigation carried out by the FGR itself point out that El Caderas was “a key witness. He was an operator [of Guerreros Unidos] in Iguala on the night of the attack. He was one of those who executed the order, ”these sources point out, referring to the attack and the disappearance of the 43. His testimony would have been important to deepen the knowledge of the structure and relations of Guerreros Unidos in the region, once understood as pyramidal and hierarchical, today assumed as complex, heterogeneous and chaotic, divided into cells that acted with certain independence.
Among the pending arrests are at least five municipal police officers from the neighboring town of Huitzuco, one of the vertices of the polygon that was the scene of the attack, along with Iguala, Cocula and Tepecoacuilco, mainly. Among them, the former police chief, Javier Núñez Duarte and his son, Celedonio. It has been known for years - this thanks to the work of the National Human Rights Commission, CNDH - that the Huitzuco police participated in the attack against the boys, mainly on the stage of the Palace of Justice. The prosecution works to finally obtain the arrest warrants from the judge.
Another of the groups pending to stop is that of Los Tilos, always considered under the orbit of the Casarrubias clan, leaders of Guerreros Unidos, a notion that has been the subject of discussion for some time. The level of independence with which Los Tilos acted on the night of the events, nor their closeness to the Casarrubias, is not clear. For years this group has been targeted as perpetrators of the attack against Julio César Mondragón, part of the contingent of normalistas, whose body appeared on September 27, 2014, tortured, in Iguala. But his participation on the night of the events could have been greater.
According to one of the prosecution's witnesses, an old member of Guerreros Unidos, Los Tilos, made up of the Benítez Palacios brothers and their henchmen, the 43 were murdered in collaboration with the military, a fact that for now remains a conjecture: there are no more witnesses they say the same.
In any case, the statements of this witness, whose name is reserved Juan, should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is not clear if he and Los Tilos play or have played on the same criminal side and if Juan himself would have any interest in indicting them.
Los Tilos are part of the dozens of people detained during the last government, who left jail for defective form or for crimes committed by investigators.
The routes of disappearance
The testimonies of the Huitzuco police officers seem important, because they could shed light on the fate of one of the groups of disappeared boys, attacked in front of the Palace of Justice. It is this, the disappearance routes after the attack, the greenest aspect of the current investigation, due, as the prosecutor Gómez explained this Friday after the meeting in the National Palace, to the amount of evidence supposedly destroyed by time.
So far it is known that there were at least two groups of disappeared. The first, of about 15 students, raised in an ambush between Juan N. Álvarez and Periférico on the night of September 26. This group was later led to the railing, a kind of warehouse run by the Iguala police. There they lose the trail. A witness of what could have happened there, Ulises Bernabé, in charge of the installation that night, has always denied that the students arrived there. Bernabé fled to the United States, where he obtained political asylum.
Research sources indicate that the extradition request against Bernabé is imminent.
“We have two very clear pieces of evidence that the students got there.
Two people say so, two reserved witnesses.
That gives us to charge Bernabé with forced disappearance and request his extradition.
He falsified information in front of the Americans, because he said that he did not see the students, ”these sources point out.
The other setting, the Palace of Justice, seems even more mysterious.
The CNDH pointed out in its day that the group of students who disappeared there was led along with the others, from the opposite side of the municipality, perhaps by the direction of Pueblo Viejo, where dozens of clandestine graves have been found, or even on the side of Cocula , towards the path of the Barranca de la Carnicería.
In addition to the Huitzuco police, other people present in that place during the attack, ignored until now, could provide information.
In the same way, investigators hope to find evidence that was believed to be lost, specifically security videos of the Palace of Justice itself, whose appearance could expand the knowledge of this scenario.
In the Office of the Prosecutor they also have the idea that there is a third group of disappeared boys that they call "collected", students who, like Julio César Mondragón, fled from one or another scene.
His fate is just as uncertain as that of the others, even more so, because in this case there is not even a specific place, leaving the entire Iguala and its surroundings as the scene of his tragedy.
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