Thursday, September 15, 2022

Mexico arrests Army general in students’ disappearance

MEXICO CITY — Mexico has arrested an Army general accused of involvement in the deaths of the 43 students who disappeared on their way to a demonstration in 2014, authorities said, a crime that shocked the country but remains unsolved.


Mexico arrests Army general in students’ disappearance© Claudio Cruz/AFP/Getty Images

Gen. José Rodríguez Pérez is the latest in a series of officials arrested for allegedly participating in or covering up the abduction of the teachers’ college students from the rural town of Ayotzinapa eight years ago this month. The remains of three of the students have been recovered.

Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s former attorney general, was arrested last month for his alleged role in a coverup. Taken together, the arrests show a rare effort by the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to hold security officials accountable for human rights abuses in Mexico.Mexico arrests former attorney general in kidnapping of 43 students

Rodríguez Pérez is the highest-ranking military officer arrested in the case. Warrants for three others also were issued this week, according to Mexico’s deputy security minister. Two of them were detained; one remains a fugitive.

“Four arrest warrants have been issued against members of the Mexican Army,” Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejía told reporters Thursday. “There are three people arrested, among them the commander of the 27th infantry battalion when the events took place in Iguala in September 2014.”

Rodríguez Pérez, who was a colonel at the time of the students’ disappearance, is accused of playing a significant role.

Six of the disappeared students “were turned over to the colonel,” Alejandro Encinas, Mexico’s undersecretary for human rights, said at a news conference last month.

Encinas said the six were “killed and disappeared on orders of the colonel, allegedly the then-Colonel José Rodríguez Pérez.”

The students were commandeering buses, a local custom, to travel to the demonstration in Mexico City. Encinas said they probably unwittingly stole a bus loaded with drugs or money.

Local law enforcement officials forced them off the vehicles. It’s unclear what happened next, but Encinas has said that state and federal officials neglected to stop the kidnapping and rescue the students, though they could have.Mexico putting civilian-led national guard under military control

The disappearance of 43 students shocked Mexico, but under former Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, no serious attempts were made to solve the crime. Instead, officials shielded the role that federal officials played in the disappearance.

López Obrador now appears to be pursuing the federal officials that his predecessor would not. That effort has been seen as a positive development by the victims’ families and human rights advocates. But some analysts have questioned whether López Obrador is motivated primarily by the opportunity to criticize Peña Nieto.

López Obrador’s decision to arrest a senior member of the military — one of the country’s most powerful institutions — does carry some political risk. He has leaned on the military for a range of objectives, from deploying soldiers across the country in a domestic security initiative to constructing a 900-mile train in southern Mexico. That reliance on the armed forces has raised concerns among human rights advocates.

Mexico’s attorney general’s office has issued more than 80 arrest warrants in the case.

Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul contributed to this report.


Mexican authorities arrest general in case of missing students

Mexican authorities have arrested a general and two other members of the army for alleged connection to the disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico in 2014, the government announced Thursday.



Family members and friends march seeking justice for the missing 43 Ayotzinapa students in Mexico City on Aug. 26. (Marco Ugarte / Associated Press)© (Marco Ugarte / Associated Press)

Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejía said that among those arrested was the commander of the army base in Iguala, Guerrero, in September 2014, when the students from a radical teachers' college were abducted. Mejía said a fourth arrest was expected soon.

Mejía did not give names of those arrested, but the commander of the Iguala base at that time was José Rodríguez Pérez, then a colonel. Barely a year after the students' disappearances and with the missing students' families already raising suspicions about military involvement and demanding access to the base, Rodríguez was promoted to brigadier general.

Last month, a government truth commission reinvestigating the case issued a report that named Rodríguez as being allegedly responsible for the disappearance of six of the students.

Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas, who led the commission, said last month that six of the missing students were allegedly kept alive in a warehouse for days, then turned over to Rodríguez, who ordered them killed.

The report had called the disappearances a “state crime,” emphasizing that authorities had been closely monitoring the students from the teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa from the time they left their campus through their abduction by local police in the town of Iguala that night. A soldier who had infiltrated the school was among the abducted students, and Encinas asserted the army did not follow its own protocols and try to rescue him.

“There is also information corroborated with emergency 089 telephone calls where allegedly six of the 43 disappeared students were held during several days and alive in what they call the old warehouse and from there were turned over to the colonel,” Encinas said. “Allegedly the six students were alive for as many as four days after the events and were killed and disappeared on orders of the colonel, allegedly the then-Col. José Rodríguez Pérez.”

Numerous government and independent investigations have failed to reach a conclusive narrative about what happened to the 43 students, but it appears that local police pulled the students off several buses in Iguala that night and turned them over to a drug gang. The motive remains unclear. Their bodies have never been found, though fragments of burned bone have been matched to three of the students.

The role of the army in the students’ disappearance has long been a source of tension between the families and the government. From the beginning, there were questions about the military’s knowledge of what happened and its possible involvement. The students’ parents demanded for years that they be allowed to search the army base in Iguala. It was not until 2019 that they were given access along with Encinas and the truth commission.

Shortly after the truth commission's report, the attorney general’s office announced 83 arrest orders, 20 of which were for members of the military. Then federal agents arrested Jesús Murillo Karam, who was attorney general at the time.

Doubts had been growing in the weeks since the orders were announced because no arrests had been reported. The administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has also formed a closer public bond with the military than any in recent memory.

The president pushed to shift the newly created National Guard under full military authority, and his allies in congress are trying to extend the time for the military to continue a policing role in the streets to 2028.

On Thursday, Mejía also dismissed any suggestion that José Luis Abarca, who was mayor of Iguala at the time, would be released from prison after a judge absolved him of responsibility for the students' abduction based on a lack of evidence. Even without the aggravated kidnapping charge, Abarca still faces other charges for organized crime and money laundering, and Mejía said the judge’s latest decision would be challenged. The judge similarly absolved 19 others, including the man who was Iguala’s police chief at the time.

The Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center and other nongovernmental organizations that have supported the families of the students said in a joint statement Thursday that the government had so far not notified the families of the case against Rodríguez nor the charges he would face.

They said that if the prosecution of Rodríguez did advance on “solid evidence,” it could be very relevant for holding the military accountable. The statement noted that there was “abundant” evidence about the collusion of soldiers from the Iguala base with organized crime.

The organizations also called on authorities to appeal the judge’s decision absolving Abarca and others. They said the ruling was the result of poor work by the attorney general’s office that originally brought the charges, including the extensive use of torture, which led much of the evidence to be excluded.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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