Parents of 43 ordinary students from Ayotzinapa during a presentation of the GIEI tests in Mexico City on September 29, 2022. Galo Cañas Rodríguez (Cuartoscuro)
It seemed like good news. After the Tomás Zerón fiasco, these messages were a balm to the president’s commission of inquiry into the Ayotzinapa case. In February, the person responsible for the commission, the Secretary of State for Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, traveled to Israel to bring Zerón back. But the former official, architect of the so-called historical truth, the version put together by the previous government to settle the case, had refused to cooperate. Hence the anticipation with the news. There have been hundreds of communications from the Iguala criminal network, framed in 467 screenshots, reflecting the possible fate of the 43 normalist students who disappeared from this Guerrero municipality eight years ago.
The information came in April, two months after meeting Zerón, according to what EL PAÍS has learned from sources who have been closely following the investigation process over the past few months. A person known to the Commission and the other two investigative teams, the Group of International Experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (GIEI) and the Prosecutor’s Special Unit for the Case (UEILCA), contacted the Encinas group cell phones and USB sticks. There, he defended, messages were exchanged between members of the different cells of Guerreros Unidos and between them and authorities at different levels.
Controversial from day one, the reports now symbolize the current government’s investigators’ first major stumble. This Monday, the GIEI appeared before the press to report that an expert opinion it had commissioned concluded that it could not be guaranteed that they were genuine. The GIEI gave various reasons, for example that WhatsApp’s double blue tick appeared in some messages from October 2014, a functionality that the application would not reach until a month later. Or that other messages were sent after the screenshot… The question now indicates the scope of the report. Their authenticity could not be verified, but are they fake then? And if so, how did they end up in an official Commission report? Why weren’t they verified beforehand?
The news closed parts of the story of the attack on the normalistas, who had hardly left the field of hypotheses in all these years. For example, reports were received stating that the then mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, ordered the attack on the boys, presumably to protect a drug shipment. As the DEA office in Chicago (USA) documented at the time, the criminal group used passenger buses to run a heroin transfer route between Iguala and the northern country.
Messages corresponding to page 55 of the Presidency’s report of the Truth and Access to Justice Commission on the Ayotzinapa case, El País
The communications also showed the constant exchange of two soldiers with Guerreros Unidos, one of them the commander of one of the two army garrisons in Iguala, the 27th Infantry Battalion, then Colonel José Rodríguez, now General. These were messages exchanged during the attack but also days later, like one on September 30 in which Rodríguez said they were “taking care of” six of the missing students trapped in a warehouse since the attack were held. Rodríguez would have ordered his murder.
The Chinese
In many of the messages, one of the interlocutors was David Cruz Hernández, aka El Chino, then a civil defense worker in Iguala and part of the structure of Guerreros Unidos. Arrested since the years of Enrique Peña Nieto’s government (2012-2018), the GIEI early established its involvement in the murder of one of the three students who fell during the night of September 26th into the early morning of September 27th, 2014 . Julio Cesar Mondragon. In the GIEI reports, El Chino also seems implicated in one of the possible scenarios where the criminals could have murdered part of the students, Pueblo Viejo, on the outskirts of Iguala.
El Chino’s presence in the news received by the Commission was no coincidence. The source who brought them said that while he was in a prison in Nayarit, he was a cellmate of the Guerreros Unidos criminal. According to this person, after his release from prison, he had contacted El Chino’s partner at the time of the attack, who would have saved messages that El Chino and herself had exchanged with colleagues from Guerrero’s Unidos, friends and authorities. The commission’s report also includes some messages from aka Karen, El Chino’s partner at the time.
Reports corresponding to page 69 of the El País report
The strange thing about all this is that the source of the commission was a prosecution witness under his alias for months. In 2021, this person, whose name does not appear in these lines so as not to obstruct the investigation, had testified before the Special Unit for Investigations and Trials for the Ayotzinapa Case of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the UEILCA, then under the command of Omar Gómez Trejo. In that statement, the source did not mention possession of message packages between El Chino, authorities and the rest of the criminal group.
Within the commission, the person who was in contact with the source, coordinating the delivery of the messages and adding them to the group’s investigations, was its technical secretary Félix Santana, a man who has worked with Undersecretary Encinas for years. For some reason, and contrary to the working dynamic built up over the years between the GIEI, the Commission and the UEILCA, the Encinas team has not shared the new package of evidence with the other teams, a situation the Commission has not yet explained.
On August 18th, the Commission presented the report of its work over these years and, for the first time, informed the rest of the teams, the families of the 43 and their lawyers of the existence of the 467 screenshots. Published the same day, the Commission transmitted much of the crossed-out message, but a few weeks later the unedited report had already reached various media outlets. The controversy surrounding the leak overshadowed a nuclear issue for the research groups: the veracity of the news, questioned from day one by an annoying GIEI, which prompted an expert report on the exchange.
Testify
In addition to the expert report, in mid-August UEILCA, still headed by Gómez Trejo, called the Commission’s source to testify again, depositing the same material it had given to the Encinas group months earlier. The prosecution unit also recorded a statement from technical secretary Santana to try to understand the process of obtaining the information. At the time, half of Mexico was still speechless at the revelations of the uncrossed-out report and the accusations made by Encinas himself against General Rodríguez. His name had gone unnoticed when the report was presented, and it was Encinas himself who said days later that the alias Colonel that appeared in the document was the military chief.
Two and a half months later, all the innovations that the report and its implications were supposed to contain seem to have fizzled out. Encinas has been defending the commission’s work these days, noting that the progress is solid, with or without screenshots. Encinas gave the example of one of the source-submitted communications referenced in the report. “At 07:37,” says the report on the exchange, which relates to September 27, 2014, hours after the attack, “El Chino says to El Negro: ‘Patron, everything is ready, the packages were distributed, some to huitzu, old town and some to the river. And the material was recovered. Everything is fine at the moment, boss.” Black replies: “That’s it then. There I wire them something extra to distribute to the people. I don’t want a riot for a few days. Take off your Hs and tell the others to get their people off while all the commotion calms down.”
Communications according to the second part of the report on page 76. El País
El Negro, a character who’s been little talked about in the investigation these years, sends a final message: “Don’t tag me unless it’s very necessary.” Put the phones away, leave nothing behind.” According to Encinas, at least 12 sources support what appears in the previous messages, including testimonies from several protected witnesses, analysis of phone calls, previous GIEI reports, etc. Although that is the case in this particular case is not the case for others, in the case of General Rodríguez. Prosecutors, arrested in September, have accused him of organized crime, an argument based on information unrelated to the report. The discarded screenshots pointed to his responsibility for the murder of several of the missing students. Without the arrests, this allegation is little more than a tentative hypothesis.
The same applies to the end goal of the students. The news points to criminals and authorities distributing the boys or their bodies to dispose of the remains. First, the criminals would have scattered their bodies in Huitzuco, Pueblo Viejo, the Balsas River — other than the river into which the old prosecutor said Guerreros Unidos had thrown some of the students — a mine, even wells some dumped. Later, other news indicates that given the scandal created by the attack, criminals and soldiers moved the remains so as not to find them. It is even suggested that some of the bodies would have been concentrated in a military barracks. Without the news, much of these hypotheses lose strength or fall straight down, particularly those pointing to the movements of the criminal network in the days following the attack.
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