Tomás Zerón, speaks during a press conference in 2014.PGR
Tomás Zerón leaves the media basement and half of Mexico wonders what will become of him.
The interview that he gave a few days ago to an influential media outlet in Israel, where he has lived for almost three years, revives one of the great questions of recent times in the country: Will Zerón return?
Will Israel accept the extradition request?
Accused of torture and forced disappearance in the framework of the Ayotzinapa case, part of the success or failure of the Government —and of the State— this six-year term, he has to do with his fate.
The former head of investigators of the Prosecutor's Office plays with the clock in favor.
Few efforts have been made by the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, through clumsiness and resistance, such as the one dedicated to trying to resolve the Ayotzinapa case.
Despite this, the return of Zerón, who the investigators think he has valuable information to solve the case, seems increasingly complicated.
Judging by the interview in Israel, Zerón feels more and more secure and confident that his host country will not hand him over.
Mexico is silent for now.
It has been tried in various ways.
Both the head of the presidential commission investigating the case, one of the various groups participating in the investigations, and the prosecutor in charge of bringing the case before the judge, have traveled to Israel over the years to pave the way for Zeron's return. .
The latter, Omar Gómez, tried to explain to his peers there the accusations pending against him, related to the Ayotzinapa case, especially the one that has to do with forced disappearance, difficult to understand in Israel.
Gómez Trejo, who resigned due to pressure in September, explained that, although it sounds very strong to accuse someone of a crime like that, if they have not had direct participation in the facts, the law allows the degree of guilt to be calculated according to their involvement, active or omisa, case of Zeron.
For the current investigators, Zerón did not make an effort to investigate the attack against the Ayotzinapa students and the disappearance of the 43. Instead, he organized a setup to close the false case, preventing the normalistas from being searched for, still in a stage very early in the investigations.
The head of the presidential commission, Alejandro Encinas, Undersecretary for Human Rights of the Ministry of the Interior, also traveled to Israel.
Far from the institutional scaffolding, Encinas traveled undercover to meet personally with Zerón.
The official tried to convince him to return, offering him guarantees and procedural advantages, a matter that Zerón himself, who hired a team of detectives to record the meeting, has dedicated himself to airing in recent months.
In fact, in the interview in Israel, Zerón almost made fun of Encinas' attempt.
“He must be very naive or very desperate to think that with those promises he could convince me to return to Mexico,” he said.
The departure of Gómez Trejo and the noise that Encinas' trip generated in Israel, according to the authors of the interview with Zerón, seem to have complicated the case.
And that, in a context of paralysis like the one that the investigations have been experiencing since the end of last year, is not good news.
Neither for the Government, which considered the case resolved by December, nor for the families of the 43 disappeared students, tired of a process that has lasted almost 10 years.
Despair around the case spreads, a sensation similar to that experienced in the last years of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
The circumstances are, however, clearly different.
Then, public opinion began to learn about the mismanagement of Zerón and his team.
And an idea was born, assumed now, that the story that the Government had transferred to society, the murder of the 43 in a garbage dump, the burning of their bodies and the disappearance of the remains in a river, could be a montage.
On the other hand, the progress these years has been clear.
Remains of two of the 43 have been found in a place other than the mentioned garbage dump, a good part of the skein generated by Zerón and his people has been unraveled, the knowledge that different security corporations had of what happened has been documented, sometimes in real time.
A good part of the ties between organized crime in the area and the State apparatus, mainly the Army, have been shed light.
But since the end of last year, everything seems to have stopped, quiet, a perception that both the new prosecutor, Rosendo Gómez, and Encinas himself have rejected.
A couple of weeks ago, the third group of investigators, in addition to the commission and the Prosecutor's Office, the group of experts that the IACHR commissioned for the case, the GIEI, detailed the paralysis, focused on two crucial points for them and for the families of the 43. On the one hand, they denounced, as they had done before, the resistance within the Army to deliver information collected at the time of the attack, messages intercepted with spyware to the Iguala criminal network.
The above is important, first, because it would help with the drawing of the mafia structure in the area.
And second, derived from the first, because it would illuminate possible search routes for the students, or their remains, unknown until now.
The GIEI said that the information in question is made up of around 100 documents, which people within the Ministry of Defense (Sedena) have moved, even from place, to hinder the search.
The problem for the Army is that any noise or scandal around these documents results in an uncomfortable situation for the agency: the verification that Sedena knew in real time what happened before, during and after the attack against the normalistas, information that, until where it is known, he did not share with anyone, thus suffocating the search efforts in the first moments.
The other important point, also pointed out by the GIEI, is the reactivation of a series of arrest warrants that the Prosecutor's Office unit for the case, in the time of Gómez Trejo, obtained from the judge, 21 in total, including 16 against military personnel. , one to stop a colonel.
The cancellation of the orders occurred at the request of Gómez Trejo's superiors, in a context of pressure on the prosecutor due to differences in how to face part of the investigation.
All this amidst, moreover, the enormous controversy aroused after the publication of the report of the presidential commission, which pointed out, with evidence now declared invalid, that high-ranking officers of the Army ordered the assassination apart from the boys.
The criticisms of the cancellation of the orders, in force, share space with the doubts about the solidity of the indictment, pointed out by the new prosecutor, Gómez Piedra, according to sources close to the case consulted by EL PAÍS.
These same sources indicate that the new prosecutor could be about to reactivate at least six of the orders, although at the moment it is not known which ones it would be.
The arrest warrants, the Army papers and the extradition of Zerón appear as demands on the map of the possible in the Ayotzinapa case.
The same is true of the process against the former attorney general during the first part of the Peña Nieto government, Jesús Murillo Karam, in prison since August 2022, accused of torture, forced disappearance and crimes against the administration of justice, for the Ayotzinapa case.
For Gómez Piedra, bringing the accusation to a successful conclusion is a priority.
The case awaits the beginning of the intermediate stage, in which the FGR will present the evidence that supports its accusations.
Murillo's lawyers have been deferring the times, according to another source close to the process, asking the Prosecutor's Office to incorporate testimonies from actors linked to the case that, in their opinion, distorts the accusations of the investigators.
In September, the attack against the contingent of normal school students from the Ayotzinapa rural school turns nine.
The objective that the Government set for itself at the beginning of its mandate, to solve the case, to discover why they attacked the boys, where they took them, what they did with them, who participated, seems far away.
Progress has been made in some parts, but with a year and a half to go until the end of the six-year term, fully answering all the questions seems increasingly difficult.
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