The Navy's intelligence chief denies any involvement in the 'Ayotzinapa case'

Marco Antonio Ortega at an event in 2015 in Tamaulipas.@fgcabezadevaca

The statement of a Navy chief on the

reached the press this Tuesday, days after the international group of experts that helps in the investigation revealed a secret operation of the unit in the first weeks of the investigations, in 2014. Admiral Marco Antonio Ortega went to testify at the end of March, as reported by the

newspaper .

The sailor was then "intelligence chief" of the Navy, as federal sources have explained to EL PAÍS.

The matter is relevant due to the revelation of the GIEI, the group of experts that the IACHR commissioned to Mexico to support the investigations.

Last week, the GIEI reported that on October 27, 2014, a month after the attack against the normalista students in Iguala, Guerrero, the Navy carried out an operation in the Cocula garbage dump, a central place in the narrative that the Government deployed then about the fate of the boys.

According to that version, the Guerreros Unidos criminal group murdered the 43 missing normalistas there and then burned their bodies, throwing the remains into a nearby river.

Until last week, it was unknown that the Navy had acted in the dump, less before the competent authority arrived to investigate the events, the former Attorney General's Office (PGR).

According to the video and the information released by the GIEI, marines manipulated the scene, lowering objects from a truck and raising others, even lighting a fire in the upper part of the landfill.

The stagecoach was recorded on video by a drone.

Due to the type of drone and the information recorded in the report that accompanies the recording, the GIEI presumes that the operation was carried out by the naval intelligence unit, which Ortega directs.

In the

note , Ortega's lawyer points out that the current investigators of

offered the admiral a criterion of opportunity, the famous status of protected witness, so mentioned these years by the

and Emilio Lozoya case.

The same sources mentioned above assure this newspaper that this did not happen.

"It is not necessary, this because of the amount of evidence that there is," they say.

In the statement, Ortega denied having participated in operations in Guerrero in 2014, nor in investigative actions in the framework of

.

“Question 46 of the interrogation,” reads the newspaper note, “was if he knew of any finding by the Navy in the Cocula dump, where they had transferred bone remains or clothing found in that place by Navy personnel.

Ortega Siu denied having any knowledge of it.”

Almost eight years after the attack, the role of the Navy in the first months of the investigation remains a mystery.

What little is known is that marines collaborated with the PGR in the arrest of dozens of suspects.

Many of them were tortured.

A good part of the arrests occurred in the last weeks of October, when the sailors went to the Cocula garbage dump, according to the GIEI.

In 2018, the Office in Mexico of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights revealed that at least 34 detainees suffered torture.

“The acts of torture, both physical and psychological, would have been carried out by members of the Federal Police, the Federal Ministerial Police (PGR), the Navy and other ministerial personnel of the PGR, mainly from the deputy attorney for organized crime in the 34 documented cases. ”, the report said.

The United Nations report also mentioned the case of a detainee, Emmanuel Alejandro Blas Patiño, "who would have died as a result of the torture inflicted by members of the Navy who would have participated in his arrest."

According to the UN investigation, Patiño was arrested on October 27, 2014 in Cuernavaca, along with two other people.

His death, however, erased it from the informative parts of the agency.

"Emmanuel Alejandro Blas Patiño would have died in the garden of the building where the three were detained, as a result of suffocation with a plastic bag and multiple blows," the report added.

An investigation was never opened in this case.

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