A demonstration in memory of the students of Ayotzinapa in Mexico City in November 2022. Nayeli Cruz (El País)
The dismissal of the prosecutors and officials who led one of the two teams of the Attorney General’s Office’s Special Unit (FGR) in the Ayotzinapa case marks the end of a chapter in the investigation. The team led by Gonzalo Cartas was responsible for the trials of the old heads of the investigative agency during the years of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), the cases of Tomás Zerón, Jesús Murillo or Gualberto Ramírez, a despised era. Their work began in June 2019 when the special unit was born. They held on after their boss, Omar Gómez Trejo, resigned last September. Now his successor, Rosendo Gómez Piedra, is putting the finishing touches on it.
Cartas comes out at the same time as the person in charge of contextual analysis, Elena Jaloma, and does important work in the part of the investigations that are integrated into the new justice system. The long-running Ayotzinapa case includes old investigations dating back more than eight years and subject to old rules, as well as new investigations, such as those against Zerón and Murillo or a more recent one, that of senior intelligence official Services, Ignacio Mendoza. . In the case of the new system, contextual analyzes are fundamental to the development of the investigations.
In addition to the two, Gómez Piedra has decided to dismiss three employees of the Context Analysis Unit and a ministry official who worked with them. Without the Cartas team, all key officials from the FGR unit responsible for the case, the UEILCA, have only been involved in the investigation for a year. They all arrived from Tabasco with Gómez Piedra last September. Gómez Piedra is close to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Undersecretary of Human Rights Alejandro Encinas. The three occurred during the president’s years at the helm of the Mexico City government
With these dismissals, the Mexican state is effectively nationalizing the investigation into the Ayotzinapa case. López Obrador indicated at the start of his six-year term that solving the problem was a priority. Then the investigations appeared as a joint effort of three teams: the Presidential Commission COVAJ, entrusted to Undersecretary Encinas, the UEILCA led by Gómez Trejo and the GIEI, the human rights expert group assigned to Mexico by the Inter-American Commission. .
Of the three groups, the only independent group, the GIEI, no longer exists. After a turbulent year marked by the departure of two of its four members and constant complaints about the authorities’ lack of transparency, the GIEI bowed out in July, criticizing the army’s resistance to releasing documents related to the case. The other two remain, one part of the government and the other part of the state. COVAJ, part of the executive branch, was unpredictable during these years. In 2022, it presented a report with unverifiable data, which provoked criticism from the GIEI and the resignation of two of its members.
The case of the UEILCA is somewhat different. Its first owner, Omar Gómez Trejo, worked with the GIEI during its first stop in Mexico, during the Peña Nieto years. The work was difficult at the time because the old public prosecutor’s office did not cooperate. Already under López Obrador, the presence of Gómez Trejo in the FGR gave peace of mind to the families. The discovery of the remains of two of the 43 missing students in an area near Iguala, the site of the attack, legitimized his efforts and those of his team. His departure, forced by pressure from Attorney General Alejandro Gertz to speed up the investigation, ended with Gómez Piedra taking office.
Therefore, there is currently no external oversight of the state’s work in this case. Days before the ninth anniversary of the attack, the progress of the last year is being ignored, apart from the reactivation of a handful of arrest warrants requested at the time by Gómez Trejo and canceled by another unit of the FGR in a tug of war with prosecutor Gertz. The lack of oversight is worrying as families and their lawyers lack tools with which to assess the strength of the evidence and stories now presented by COVAJ and the new UEILCA, a situation that is likely to arise in the coming days.
The students’ families and their lawyers met this Wednesday with the President at the National Palace, a meeting that had not taken place for almost a year. Then the families showed their concern about what had happened in the previous months, the pressure from Gertz, the departure of Gómez Trejo, the failed COVAJ report, the impending break in the GIEI… López Obrador’s response was to reject any pressure to deny reaffirm their commitment to the case. This Wednesday, in his morning press conference, the President insisted on the same point, focusing his criticism on NGOs and organizations such as the UN or the OAS – umbrella organizations of the IACHR and the GIEI. “These pseudo-human rights defenders have made it their mission to profit from people’s suffering. “They live very well, make a lot of money and think very conservatively,” he said.
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