By Kathleen Bohne
Below you will find an excerpt from the September 4 edition of “La Semana” newsletter. To read the complete article and subscribe, please visit www.themexpatriate.com.
President López Obrador’s first official action when he was sworn into office in December 2018 was the formation of the Comisión para la Verdad y Acceso a la Justicia (Commission for Truth and Access to Justice). The commission (CoVAJ) was tasked with the case of “the 43”, students from the Ayotzinapa rural teacher’s college who disappeared nearly eight years ago in Iguala, Guerrero. The CoVAJ was given the president’s mandate for “unveiling the facts, learning the truth of what occurred and the whereabouts of the students, and finding and bringing those responsible to justice.” On August 18, the commission presented a 97-page report of its findings, and shortly afterwards, former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested on charges of torture, enforced disappearance and obstruction of justice.
Some of López Obrador’s detractors have gone as far as to describe Murillo as a “political prisoner”, while others celebrated the arrest of the public face of “la verdad histórica”, or the “historical truth”, as presented at an infamous “case closed” press conference in early 2015. This phrase has become shorthand for government mendacity, akin to “se cayó el sistema” or “the system crashed” during the controversial election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988. The narrative told by Murillo and the Peña Nieto administration has been repeatedly questioned and undermined by independent investigators and the families of the missing students ever since.
What did the CoVAJ report reveal that wasn’t already public knowledge? How much does it differ from Murillo’s “truth”? It is hard to fully answer these questions since key sections of the report are heavily redacted, including the paragraphs under the headings “Orders to Execute the Students”, “The Disappearance of the Students”, and “The Government Clean-up”. A statement issued by members of the GIEI (Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts) on August 22 appeared to distance the international group—who have been working on the case since 2015—from the CoVAJ report since they were not given prior notice of its publication, nor have been granted access to the critical records of phone calls and text messages found in the blacked out sections. The families of the victims were only notified the day before the report’s release.
As I read through the CoVAJ document, I was struck by two thoughts: first, that this case is like looking for an image hidden in an optical illusion. For a fleeting moment, the image appears so clearly, but then it merges back into the ambiguous bigger picture. The second is a vertiginous sense of peering over a cliff of crimes. This single case has been exhaustively investigated and documented, with the support of foreign forensic experts and painstaking review of 41,000 digitized documents, while hundreds of thousands of cases lack even the semblance of an investigation: 94.8% of crimes remain unsolved.
This latest report shares much in common with the third report published by the GIEI in April of this year. Both provide a context and background for the events of September 26-27 2014: the presence of various drug cartels vying for control in the area (Guerreros Unidos and Los Rojos), their infiltration of local law enforcement and government, and the surveillance by the military of not just criminal activity, but also “la escuela normal” of Ayotzinapa. The Peña Nieto administration has since become notorious for its use of Pegasus surveillance “malware”, bugging journalists, forensic experts and others involved in investigation of the Ayotzinapa case. The CoVAJ report states they reviewed 17,020 audio recordings and 467 screen captures of WhatsApp messages, noting that some additional communication logs were provided by the DEA, who were also monitoring Guerreros Unidos. Both reports also emphasize the significance of the “fifth bus” and its absence in the “historical truth”: this was the bus that investigators today believe was carrying either heroin or cash and that may have been the key motive for attacking the students. It was one of the buses the normalistas tried to commandeer that night, and after the students were forced out of it, the bus passed through 17 checkpoints without being stopped.
The report confirms that one of the 43 was in fact an undercover soldier, Julio César López Patolzin, who was assigned to infiltrate the school in 2012 and who last checked in with his superior the morning of September 26, 2014. Despite one of their own being caught in the attacks and subsequent kidnapping of the students, no efforts to rescue the soldier were attempted. Deputy Secretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, announced at a mañanera on August 24 that six of the students had been held (alive) for up to four days following the initial attacks and their execution was allegedly ordered by then-colonel José Rodríguez Pérez, who is today a general. There is no official word on whether he will be charged, though 20 of the 83 warrants issued on August 19 are for military personnel.
