Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez, former head of the SEIDO specialized investigation unit, during an appearance in Mexico City, in March 2016. Secretaries of State
A judge has requested the arrest of Gualberto Rámirez, one of the commanders of the former administration of the Prosecutor's Office, for torturing a detainee during the investigations of the Ayotzinapa case.
Sources close to the investigation have confirmed to this newspaper the arrest warrant, the second against the former official, who remains unaccounted for.
In 2014, Ramírez directed the first steps of the investigation into the Ayotzinapa case.
In charge of the agency's anti-kidnapping unit, he requested discharge in 2019.
Along with the fugitive Tomás Zerón and the forgotten Jesús Murillo Karam, Ramírez is an important character in the construction of the historical truth, the questionable narrative elaborated during the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), about the attack against the normalista students in September 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero.
So, Murillo Karam was the prosecutor, Zerón the coordinator of the investigations and Ramiréz the link immediately below.
The Prosecutor's Office accuses the former official of participating in the torture against one of the alleged attackers, Felipe Rodríguez, alias El Brush.
Supposedly a member of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group, part of the criminal network that launched the hunt against the students, El Brush was one of many detainees tortured during the first months of the investigation.
In a report released in 2017, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico noted that at least 34 detainees in the case had been tortured.
In the specific case of El Brush, Ramírez shares the accusation with Tomás Zerón.
In 2020, in a video of the interrogation leaked to the media, El Brush appeared bare-chested and with his head covered, in a room next to Zerón.
The former police officer told the detainee: “Tell me everything you know about the students.
The first lie you tell me, the subject is over and we begin”.
Ramírez was with them in the same room.
Zerón is also accused of the torture of another detainee, Agustín García Reyes, alias El Chereje.
In the case of El Brush, the special unit of the Prosecutor's Office that is investigating the case, led by Omar Gómez, is also seeking the arrest of a high-ranking official from the National Intelligence Center (CNI), Ignacio Mendoza, who was also present at the interrogation. .
Then an official of CISEN, predecessor of the CNI, Mendoza is accused of torture, coalition of public servants, interception of private communications and forced disappearance of people, in his cover-up modality.
The accusations of torture against Mendoza, Ramírez and Zerón himself stem from a battery of videos that the CNI itself delivered to the Prosecutor's Office.
Unknown until two years ago, their existence denied in requests for information covered by the transparency law, the videos have expanded the knowledge that investigators had of the use of torture during the first months of the investigation, at the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.
Beyond torture, Ramírez's role in the construction of historical truth is central.
The official participated in one of the central events of the old narrative, the supposed discovery of the remains of one of the normalistas, Alexander Mora, in the San Juan River.
The investigators of the current administration of the Prosecutor's Office point out that that finding was a set-up.
Thus, they reject the conclusions of the Government of Peña Nieto, Murillo and Zerón himself: the murder of the 43 normalistas who disappeared during the attack, the burning of their bodies in the garbage dump of the neighboring town of Cocula and the subsequent disappearance of the remains in the river.
Ramírez appears precisely on the river stage.
According to the old investigation, the detainee García Reyes and another presumed member of Guerreros Unidos, Jonathan Osorio, were transferred to the river area on October 29, 2014, where they would have pointed out the place where the remains of the boys were thrown.
After a while, elements of the Secretary of the Navy found bags with bone remains in the area.
The laboratory ended up confirming that the remains had belonged to the student Mora in life.
The investigation by the group of experts commissioned by the OAS discovered, however, that that visit on October 29 was preceded by another, the day before, which did not appear in the file.
Zerón and company tried to hide that visit, even from the experts who acted in the area on behalf of the families at the time, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.
Gómez and his team now believe that that previous visit served to place Mora's remains in the river, an issue that underpinned the dumpster narrative years ago.
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