There are few disappointments left by the outgoing government as great as the stagnation of the
Ayotzinapa case
.
The investigation of the attack against a contingent of normal school students almost 10 years ago in Iguala, in the State of Guerrero, and the disappearance of 43, reaches the end of the six-year term as it reached the end of the previous one, in a stalemate.
The little news on the subject responds to the political interest of the Government, determined not to look like the bad guy in the movie.
The eight soldiers imprisoned in the case, the talk of recent weeks, illustrate the above.
In this context, the new book by the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, appears, which dedicates a dozen and a half pages to the case, with an anecdote from Francisco I. Madero included.
In
Thank you!
, the president insists on the story that conservative forces infiltrated among the investigators and the team of lawyers of the families of the missing students have tried to put an end to his efforts to solve the case.
In some paragraphs, the sentences seem to have been taken from his morning tirades before the press, without any changes.
The final part of the story is surprising, the truth about Ayotzinapa according to López Obrador, due to the parts of the file that he chooses and makes his own.
They are evidence that appears in the pages of the book as bases for a truth that is currently elusive, beyond the National Palace.
López Obrador uses the statement of the protected witness Neto, one of the novelties of the investigators these years, and takes his version of the final fate of the students as truth.
The president supports Neto's statements in an unpublished document, a visit by the same witness to Iguala, pointing out the places where the students' bodies were burned.
The passage, the 18 pages, matters because it allows us to verify the logic of López Obrador, trapped in a game of all against me.
If the stagnation of the investigations into the
Ayotzinapa case
is serious, the attempt to impose a story about the reason for the
impasse
is no less so.
Thus, the bad guys in the story are, among others, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), the team of investigators that worked side by side with the Government and the Prosecutor's Office these years, until their voluntary departure last July, given the Government's failure to provide all the required information.
The GIEI embodies evil, as do the judges, guilty of releasing dozens of detainees in years of the previous Government, chaired by Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), of the PRI.
The president raises an argument here that is difficult to understand.
He acknowledges that many of those released were tortured by Peña Nieto's team of investigators, led by the attorney at the time, Jesús Murillo, and his field coordinator, Tomás Zerón.
But he criticizes that among those released there were perpetrators of the attack and the disappearance of 43 students.
What were judges supposed to do, accept torture as an investigation method?
In a similar logic, with a further point of conspiracy and paranoia, López Obrador points out that one of the magistrates guilty of releasing the perpetrators was a student of the then director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Human Rights Center, Mario Patrón.
Lawyers from the Pro Center have been part of the legal team of the families of the 43 since the attack, and have criticized the Government's maneuvers, first with Peña Nieto, and now, finally, with López Obrador.
In the president's book, the lawyers are part of the opposition scaffolding led by the “filopanista” Emilio Álvarez Icaza.
The above examples illustrate the state of affairs.
Since the summer of 2022, the rift between families and the Government has widened.
Now, the Executive does not even try to reconcile, as happened in the years of Alejandro Encinas at the head of the government team of investigators, Covaj.
His successors fight for the story and have had no qualms about using tricks criticized by the peñismo in order to appropriate it.
The last example is the cruelest: now, Covaj takes as interlocutors a minority group of relatives, led by the father of a normal student who left Iguala alive, Felipe De la Cruz, disowned by the majority years ago.
Neto and funeral homes
López Obrador chooses Neto as a vehicle for his truth.
Protected witness, he arrived at the special unit of the Prosecutor's Office for the
Ayotzinapa case
at the hands of Covaj, between 2020 and 2021. He declared that he had been a low-ranking member of the aggressor group on the night of the events, Guerreros Unidos, and that He participated in the cleanup operation after the attack.
Part of the cleanup operation included disposing of an undetermined number of bodies in two funeral homes in Iguala.
His story begins between 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. on that fateful September 26, 2014 and concludes at dawn on the 27th. Neto does not participate in the attack, according to what he says, but in the following phase, when Guerreros Unidos disposes of the bodies of the 43. The witness explains that he arrives with another member of the group at a winery in Iguala.
There they load packages wrapped in black bags.
Before, they have gone to buy cleaning products.
The packages are taken to a funeral home with a crematorium.
Since they can't all fit in, they take the rest to another crematorium, which he calls the green oven, and which served as a forensic service in the municipality.
At the first funeral home, Neto realizes that these lumps are “dismembered bodies,” because the bags break and blood begins to come out of them.
They pile up the bags with the bodies and begin to burn them.
His partner, Patricio Reyes Landa, alias Pato, communicates by radio with their boss, alias El Negro.
He tells her that bodies take time to burn.
He is the one who says to go with bodies to the other crematorium.
Neto says that while the two talk on the radio, he hears, on El Negro's side, people screaming.
El Negro is in the warehouse where they have collected the first packages.
Neto and Pato go to the second funeral home, unload bodies.
They send a third party, alias Barney, to get more cleaning products.
Together they clean that second funeral home.
Neto and Pato return to the first and do the same.
There, he says, he realizes that "not all the bodies were cremated, so I think they were put in graves."
He and his people also clean the vehicles in which they transported the bags with the bodies.
Then they return to the warehouse at the beginning, where El Negro is.
They leave the trucks, which then apparently the latter will burn.
Then Neto leaves.
The problems with his testimony are several.
First, he talks about how he acts under the orders of a man, El Negro, who has never appeared on the investigators' radar before.
To this day they do not know who he is, what relationship he had with the Casarrubias brothers, leaders of Guerreros Unidos, with their links in the area, the case of his uncle, Juan Salgado Guzmán, alias El Caderas, murdered by police from the Prosecutor's Office, in 2021, or with the main associated groups, in the case of the Benítez Palacios brothers.
Practically nothing is known, only that under the orders of El Negro, Neto says, one of the first detained in the case, alias Pato, was later released for torture.
The president's choice of Neto, from among the dozen new witnesses handled by the Prosecutor's Office, is strange.
Neto depends on a character, El Negro, that researchers have failed to identify in recent years.
The name of El Negro does not appear, for example, in the statements of one of the most important witnesses for the case, Juan, this one perfectly identified as one of the Casarrubias' lieutenants in the area at the time.
Not a mention.
He appears, however, in Carla's statements, another protected witness, perhaps one of the weakest, who served the Prosecutor's Office, a few weeks ago, to complete the accusation against eight soldiers, for their alleged collusion with Guerreros Unidos.
López Obrador accompanies this final part of the passage with two other documents, whose inclusion cannot be considered less than ironic.
These are two interventions on the communications of Guerreros Unidos and associates, which the Army made on September 26, 2014 and a few days later, on October 4, announced by Covaj in October 2021. In the first , an alleged police officer from Iguala, and “Gil,” one of the Casarrubias' lieutenants, talk about the transfer of 17 of the 43 students, held in a “cave.”
In the second, another alleged police officer from a nearby town and a Guerreros Unidos leader in the area talk about Gil's hiding place, among other things.
It is ironic, since these documents are at the center of the families' claims.
Its disclosure two and a half years ago showed the families the way: if the Army had monitored these conversations, if one of its jobs at the time was to spy on Guerreros Unidos and its institutional support scaffolding, what else was in its files?
The answer has always been nothing, an answer that López Obrador has adopted and has caused the investigations to collapse.
The president ignores the core of the families' demands.
Neither does he mention them.
It does not seem strange to him that the Army does not find more interceptions intervened.
It does not seem strange to him that these pair of documents exclusively integrate the product of military intelligence in Iguala at the time.
He doesn't question it.
It is possible that so many years later these documents did not exist.
They could have been destroyed.
This possibility reveals the limit of a State that investigates itself.
Because, if they no longer existed, why didn't the president, who swore to solve the
Ayotzinapa case
, order an investigation into the disappearance of the collection, which the GIEI estimates to be hundreds of pages?
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