Mexican Military Archives Produce New Revelations in the Ayotzinapa Case

Friday, 1 April 2022, Mexico City—International experts investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students have uncovered astonishing new evidence about the case in secret archives of the Mexican military, according to a report released Monday.

In a press conference held March 28 to present their findings, the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes—GIEI) revealed new details about the events of September 26-27, 2014, when police and drug traffickers attacked and kidnapped the young men as they rode in buses through the town of Iguala, Guerrero. The newly discovered records show that the government tracked the students continually during the hours of police gunfire and even intercepted live text messages between the kidnappers while the students were being held but never moved to rescue them. GIEI said the government intentionally falsified information and withheld critical leads that could have helped to clarify what happened to the 43 students.

The records also reveal that Mexican authorities launched a cover-up following the students’ disappearance that went far beyond what was understood previously. Central to that cover-up was the Mexican Navy, which had previously been only marginally associated with the Ayotzinapa case.

The independent group of experts

The GIEI, an investigative body of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, has been requesting access to the Mexican military’s internal records, personnel and installations since 2015, when the group was first invited by President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-18) to assist in the Ayotzinapa case. From March 2015 to April 2016, when their initial mandate ended, the GIEI’s attempts to analyze the role of the military in relation to the Ayotzinapa case were stonewalled. In October 2015, then-Secretary of Defense General Salvador Cienfuegos told a television reporter, “I can’t permit my soldiers to be treated like criminals or be interrogated so that they are later made to feel they had something to do with [the night of Iguala], instead of being supported.”

But a new government with a new commitment to solving the Ayotzinapa case sought to override the military’s concerns. On December 4, 2018 (his third day in office), President Andrés Manuel López Obrador published a decree establishing a commission to establish the truth and seek justice for the families of the victims. Article V of the decree declared that all federal agencies “possessing information or evidence that could contribute to the clarification of the facts in the search for truth must provide it to the Commission…”

The Presidential Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case (COVAJ-Ayotzinapa) began its work on January 15, 2019, headed by Subsecretary (of Interior) for Human Rights Alejandro Encinas and composed of government officials, parents of the disappeared students, and members of civil society. Following the creation of the Office of the Special Prosecutor in the Ayotzinapa case in June 2019, the GIEI was invited back to Mexico to resume its role assisting in the investigation. Four of the original five members of the group began their new mandate in March 2020: Claudia Paz y Paz, Angela Buitrago, Carlos Beristain, and Francisco Cox.

Even after the experts resumed their work, their efforts to obtain access to the archives of the armed forces were fruitless. Subsecretary Encinas and the president himself were forced to intervene on multiple occasions before the group was finally given access to military installations to examine documents in April 2021. The GIEI reviewed communications, reports, intelligence, and other records from the local military zones and battalions in Guerrero, as well as information created at senior levels of the Defense Secretariat, such as the Defense General Staff (Estado Mayor de la Defensa—EMD). (9)[1] Nevertheless, the experts said that they will continue to press for access to critical documentation that they know exists, and that the military continues to withhold. The document made public on Monday is a 40-page summary of a 270-page analysis of the military records, submitted confidentially to Encinas.

The construction of the “historical truth”

One of the most unexpected of the group’s new findings was that Marines from the Mexican Navy – a force that has been at the heart of U.S. drug war strategy in Mexico for over a decade – played a central role in the conspiracy to prepare the “crime scene” at the Cocula waste site. In 2015, then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam announced the government’s verdad histórica, or “historical truth” of the Ayotzinapa case. According to that theory, criminals from the Guerreros Unidos drug gang took the kidnapped students to the Cocula dump, where they killed them, incinerated their bodies overnight, and threw their remains into the nearby Río San Juan. Independent investigators had previously discounted that theory on the basis of multiple forensic studies and inconsistencies in the government’s analysis.

But the role of the Marines had not been previously disclosed. During their press conference on March 28, the group of experts showed never-before-seen photographs and video taken by a drone over the Cocula garbage dump on October 27, 2014 – one month after the attacks in Iguala. The drone footage began running at 6:39 a.m., when vehicles belonging to the Mexican Marines pulled into the top level of the waste site (“Zone A”-where the boys were supposedly killed by their kidnappers). For the next two hours, the Marines moved constantly around the site, from the top, down the cliff of garbage to the bottom (“Zone B”-where the boys’ bodies were supposedly burned), and in and out of their vehicles carrying unidentified objects.[2] For much of the time, one of the trucks deliberately blocked the dirt road into the dump. (pp21-27)

At 8:28 a.m., a convoy of six vehicles from the Attorney General’s office (Procuraduría General de la República, PGR) and the Secretariat of the Navy (Secretaría de la Marina, Semar) arrived. Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam was among the officials who were present, according to documents examined by the GIEI. Although the GIEI’s written account of the activities in the dump ends at 8:45 a.m., (see p28), in the March 28 press conference the GIEI showed drone images that continued to be taken until shortly after 12:00 noon. During that remaining 3 ½ hours, according to the GIEI’s narration during the presentation, PGR personnel joined the Marines at the bottom of the site (Zone B), and the now-larger group of people can be clearly seen moving and kicking materials and agitating and manipulating the entire space at the bottom of the cliff of garbage. At one point (approx. 10 a.m.) a helicopter flew overhead and briefly descended into the dump – though it didn't land – further blowing and disturbing everything underneath.

Finally, shortly before noon (according to the drone timestamp), all people present climbed back up to the top (Zone A) and the Marines got in their vehicles and drove away. At 12:06, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), headed by Mimi Doretti, arrived in cars. That morning, the team had been on their way by helicopter to a different exhumation site, where they were going to search for remains of the students. But the PGR diverted their helicopter to Cocula, claiming they had received an “anonymous phone call”[3] two days earlier directing investigators to look for the students in the dump. As the final drone images showed, soon after EAAF arrived at the site, individuals unfurled police tape across the entrance of the dump, presumably to “protect” a space that had been occupied by scores of people for more than five hours prior – a fact unknown to Mimi Doretti and her team until the GIEI’s March 28 presentation.[4]

During the GIEI’s press conference on March 28, the large audience of journalists, officials, international observers, and the parents of the 43 sat in complete silence as they watched the images–stunned to see the Mexican Marines manipulating the critical “crime scene” in the presence of Mexico’s Attorney General only hours before the arrival of the independent forensics experts.

Surveillance of the students and their kidnappers

According to the GIEI’s analysis, Mexican military archives indicate that security forces were monitoring criminal activity in Iguala as early as 2013, when authorities established a “Regional Intelligence Center” in the town to “address the problem of insecurity generated by the presence of criminal groups.” Through their intelligence operations targeting Guerreros Unidos, the authorities knew that the gang controlled Iguala, trafficked heroin from Iguala to Chicago, and used passenger buses to smuggle the drugs over the border. (5)

The archives also reveal that the Ayotzinapa teachers training college was a permanent target of surveillance and control; its students were followed constantly, reminiscent of Mexican counterinsurgency operations of the 1970s. On September 22, 2014 – four days before the attacks in Iguala – the commander of the 35th Military Zone, based in Guerrero’s capital Chilpancingo, informed his superiors that students had held a meeting inside the school and agreed to commandeer 15 buses so they could attend the annual march commemorating the October 2, 1968, student massacre at Tlatelolco. In the same document, the commander ordered all battalions in the State of Guerrero[5] to monitor the activities of the Ayotzinapa students and to “duly inform regarding the departure of groups for Mexico City for the commemoration of… 2 oct. 1968…” (6)

On the day of the attacks, the documents reveal that the armed forces, CISEN (Mexico’s National Intelligence Center), Federal Police and State Police monitored the events of Iguala in real time, including the students’ arrival in the town, their later departure, the moment the police opened fire, the deaths of three students, and the abduction of 43 of them as they were taken away in the backs of police trucks. Taken together, the new evidence shows that the Mexican government had actionable intelligence at the time of the crimes that the GIEI suggested could have led authorities to: 1-prevent the attacks altogether, 2-put a stop to the violent attacks when they were underway, or 3-rescue of the students after their abduction by municipal police. None of that happened.

The archives examined by the GIEI also contained intercepted text messages sent shortly after the boys were disappeared between members of the Guerreros Unidos gang and people linked to state and municipal authorities.[6] In one dated September 26, “Ignacio” (referred to as a “confidant of Felipe Flores Vásquez, director of public security in Iguala”) and “Gil” (referred to as a regional chief of Guerreros Unidos) discuss what to do with some of the “Ayotzinapos” captured:

Although the students were continually monitored in real time before, during, and after their abduction, the GIEI’s report notes, “This information was never given to the authorities in charge of the search [for the disappeared students] and the investigation and its existence was denied until recently.” (9)

Other relevant findings

--Although the Defense Secretariat (Sedena) has repeatedly and publicly denied since 2014 any Army connection to the attacks, the documents show the Sedena itself opened internal investigations into the actions of the 27th Infantry Battalion – which is based in Iguala – including interviewing soldiers who were present where the attacks took place. Evidence of the investigations is contained in the records provided to the GIEI; the results of the investigations are not. (12)

--According to the GIEI’s statements to journalists, the investigation into the Ayotzinapa case was actually two separate inquiries: one managed by the Attorney General’s office, or PGR, which was the public face of the government’s efforts to solve the crime; the other, a clandestine “war room” made up of the principal federal security agencies. The “war room” included officers from the PGR’s Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC), Navy (SEMAR), Defense Secretariat (SEDENA), National Intelligence Center (CISEN), Federal Police, Guerrero public security forces, and military installations in Guerrero (including the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala and the 35th Military Zone, in Chilpancingo). Information and analysis generated by the clandestine group was never shared outside the war room, even with the PGR. (32)

--From 2014-16, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, now a fugitive in Israel and the subject of an Interpol red notice and an extradition request from Mexico, was head of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) and Peña Nieto’s choice to direct the government’s Ayotzinapa investigation. He is also now confirmed by the GIEI’s analysis of the military archives as the coordinator of the war room – and, as such, director of the government’s cover-up of what happened in Iguala. As the experts wrote in their report, “Coordination of all these institutions could not have occurred without the direction of a superior authority, which must be investigated if we are to have clarity about how and why this entire operation was carried out…” (34)

--The office of the special prosecutor Omar Gómez has obtained at least 60 videos of torture sessions with some 50 people who the Peña Nieto government claimed were suspects in the Ayotzinapa case, according to the GIEI. The videos were filmed by personnel from Mexican intelligence (CISEN), as officials from the Attorney General’s office, Federal Police, Navy (Marines), and others interrogated and tortured the detainees. Tomás Zerón appears in multiple torture sessions. (32-33)

--The documents show that military authorities questioned internally the motives of the GIEI, suggesting the army should not comply with the group’s recommendations and should leak information to discredit the experts. In one report called “Background on the violent events of Iguala,” the military expressed contempt for the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (which created the GIEI in 2015), stating that the commission “achieved its intent to interfere and used the GIEI as an instrument to discredit the Mexican government, insult the PGR, and frame – without evidence – the Mexican Army.” (12-13)

Conclusion

The mandate of the group of independent experts has been extended for two more months, until June 2022. During that time, the four international experts will press the Secretariat of Defense to give access to files that are still denied them. Among their recommendations to the Mexican government, the very first one is: “ACCESS TO ALL OF THE INFORMATION.”