Mexico: Navy participated in manipulation of the Ayotzinapa case

the navy of Mexico was an active part in the manipulation and concealment of evidence in the investigation after the disappearance of 43 students in the south of the country in 2014, as well as in the construction of the official version of the government at the time, which turned out to be false, the international group investigating the case.

Sight: How many Ayotzinapa normalistas have been identified 7 years after the disappearance of the 43 students

The experts, appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), presented a new report — the first during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — that is based on military and intelligence documents and videos that were hidden for seven years. Although access to some records was blocked at times, they were finally provided thanks to the direct intervention of the president.

The report maintains that marines were operating in the garbage dump where the previous government said that the students had been incinerated hours before the place was cordoned off and without these activities being recorded in the case file.

Given the new evidence released on Monday, the head of the social communication unit of the Secretary of the Navy, Rear Admiral José Orozco, told the AP that “We are going to investigate inside” of the body the information and videos presented by the experts.

Orozco indicated that so far they are only aware that Navy divers participated in the searches in a river where the students were reportedly taken, adding that “we have no record” of which member of other units intervened in the case. , but maintained that “we are going to look for it.”

The report also indicates that the army carried out investigations that it did not share and learned in real time messages from organized crime about the whereabouts of some students, which it did not disclose despite the fact that they could have been vital in locating the young people.

However, the report does not clarify the whereabouts of the students or the motive for the brutal attack. Only three of the 43 students have been identified from charred bones found in different places.

On September 26, 2014, police from Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, captured a group of students from the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa with the participation of other security corporations and criminals. According to the version of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the young people were handed over to organized crime, which murdered them, incinerated the 43 bodies in a garbage dump in a neighboring municipality -Cocula- and threw the remains into a nearby river. The first two reports from the group of experts and the current prosecution had already said that the version of a large cremation in the dump was not real and that there was a montage in the discovery in the river in 2014 of the bone of one of the young people.

Now the new report indicates that there were two parallel investigations, the official one and another from a crisis group that did not share data, and that the so-called “historical truth” of the Peña Nieto government was a large operation led by a “higher authority” —which is not detailed— in which they participated “multiple actors”from the Guerrero police, to the federal police, the Army, the Navy, the intelligence services and various agencies of the then Attorney General’s Office (PGR).

One of the key scenarios was the Cocula dump where on October 27, 2014 the PGR announced that the 43 students had been burned in a huge bonfire.

The experts showed videos of a drone delivered by the Secretary of the Navy where on the morning of the announcement and almost six hours before the place was secured, sailors took three packages out of a vehicle – whose contents are unknown – and made a fire that it was soon turned off. People are then seen grabbing and throwing things into the deepest part of the gully. The Navy did not explain to the experts the objective of this activity.

The aerial images were compared with military documents, so the IACHR group assured that it is certain that those who were there were members of the Navy and the PGR. The video also shows a helicopter flying low over the ground and raising a large cloud of dust over where all the evidence was supposed to be. Then the then prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam arrived and hours later the team of Argentine experts representing the parents of the students. That’s when the area was cordoned off. Two weeks earlier the army had said that there was nothing in that place.

The report also presents new evidence of information gaps at key moments, although Ayotzinapa students and delinquents in the area were followed for years. It confirms that false documents were created to “legalize” irregularities and details, for example, that the anonymous call that led to the capture of those who later confessed to having murdered and cremated the young people never existed.

The existence of torture, corroborated by the IACHR and the UN, led the Mexican justice system to annul much of the evidence. Now the group had access to 60 videos of interrogations of 50 detainees carried out not only in PGR facilities but also in the Navy, which confirm that it was a systematic practice.

The then main head of the investigation, Tomás Zerón, is a fugitive in Israel accused of torture and forced disappearance. Mexico has requested his capture and extradition but it is still pending. On the mobile, there is no new data. The previous government considered that the students were confused with delinquents or that they were infiltrated by crime, but this point has not been proven. The current attorney general’s office said in 2020 that everything is framed in drug trafficking and the protection that the local cartel had from officials. Mexican and US authorities have documented heroin trafficking from Iguala to Chicago in buses like the ones the students tried to take. The IACHR experts denounced the existence of a bus that could be suspected of such traffic, but this line was never investigated and the military archives have no information about it.

The parents of the students denounced that the case was falsely closed and insisted on investigating the army. With the coming to power of López Obrador, the Truth Commission was created and a special prosecutor’s office within the federal one that in 2020 ordered the capture of military personnel for the first time. The announcement had a great symbolic load, given the increasing power that the president has given to the armed forces, but only one captured soldier has been reported. The parents’ relationship with the president has been strained by the lack of answers.

Some 140 people have been arrested since 2014 but most were released due to irregularities in their trials and only around fifty remain in prison. In addition, criminals who allegedly could have been key witnesses were killed. The group of experts, made up of the Chilean Francisco Cox, the Colombian Ángela Buitrago, the Guatemalan Claudia Paz and the Spanish Carlos Beristain and which has been investigating the case since 2015, assured that now the collaboration of the authorities is greater, but that there is still locks. The Navy, for example, denied the prosecutor in charge of the case the existence of the drone video that it did provide to them.

Source: Elcomercio

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