Newly reported text messages shed new light on the unsolved cartel massacre of 43 students in Mexico, revealing that military and government officials were involved in covering up the killings.
On September 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College seized buses to attend a protest in Mexico City and were passing through Iguala when they were ambushed by police and handed over to cartel members.
Paranoid leaders of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel apparently believed the buses full of young men were invading forces from a rival cartel, the New York Times reported in thousands of text messages on Saturday.
Nearly nine years later, there have still been no convictions in the case, and the only remains that have been recovered and positively identified are small bone fragments from three of the students.
The investigation has been riddled with flaws and courts have repeatedly dismissed charges, but now the case is gaining new momentum after authorities ordered the arrest of 20 Mexican soldiers in connection with the kidnappings, including more than a dozen in June.
Maria de los Angeles Pineda, the wife of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, was described as the “boss of bosses” behind the Guerreros Unidos cartel at the time of the massacre
Those charged in the 2014 massacre include Mexican Brigadier General José Rodríguez Pérez (left) and Mexico’s former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam (right).
The trove of cartel text messages was apparently key to building the case, which has gained momentum under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in 2018 on a reform platform.
According to the Times, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency intercepted the 23,000 messages in 2014 while investigating the cartel’s drug trade in suburban Chicago, but only turned them over to Mexican officials last year.
The news shows Mexican police, military and government officials acting as submissive quislings of the cartel, kept under control through bribery and vicious threats.
A cartel member asked a local mayor on his payroll, “Should I put your whore of a city councilman in his place, or should we remove him?”
The mayor immediately replied, “I’ll bring him to you.” He’s a good worker.’
In another message, a police commander says he went with a military officer and a cartel boss to arm gunmen in a nearby town.
When asked if he knew that the military officer had received a “small gift” from the cartel, the police commander replied: “He is happy.”
A cartel coroner discussed receiving cars from the group, declaring his loyalty to a leader in Chicago and calling him “my boss.”
“I will never turn my back on you,” he told the leader. “You’re like my family.”
One police officer admitted under interrogation that he could not resist the cartel’s regular $50 payments, which served as a kind of retainer to keep him at the gang’s beck and call.
“You say, ‘I won’t take it so I don’t get in trouble,’ but then you say, ‘No, wait,'” he said, according to a transcript of the interrogation obtained by the Times .
A journalist walks past a mass grave dug up by forensic staff to recover bodies at an alleged drug den where victims of the massacre were buried
Forensic examiners search for human remains beneath a trash-strewn hill in the densely forested mountains on the outskirts of Cocula, Mexico, on Oct. 28, 2014
The Times report does not name any of the people who sent or received the text messages in question, and it is unclear whether any of them are among those charged in the case.
In June, a federal court in Toluca, central Mexico, ordered the arrest of 16 soldiers on Monday in connection with the case, at least eight of whom surrendered.
Separately, General José Rodríguez Pérez, Captain José Martínez Crespo, Lieutenant Fabián Alejandro Pirita Ochoa and Sergeant Eduardo Mota Esquivel have been in a military prison since September last year and are accused of complicity in the massacre.
At the time of the students’ disappearance, Pérez was a colonel in command of the local army base in Iguala.
The most politically significant arrest occurred in August 2022, when Mexico’s former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested.
He was accused of enforced disappearance and did not report charges of torture of suspects and abuse of office.
He is accused of spreading a false version of events, which he called “the historical truth.”
According to this version, Iguala officials assumed the students were disrupting a local political event.
It said police rounded up the 43 students and handed them over to a local drug gang, which killed the teenagers, burned their bodies in a landfill and dumped the remains in a river.
Although all of the students were apparently murdered, it has now been proven that they were taken to different locations in groups.
Some were kept alive for days – police and military were aware of this fact, although they did nothing to save the students, according to the newly revealed text message.
Felipe Rodriguez Salgado, also known as “The Brush,” was another alleged leader of the Guerreros Unidos cartel who was arrested in 2015 in connection with the disappearance of the 43 students
Photos of missing students are seen during a march in support of missing students from Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College in Mexico City, Mexico
Also charged in the case is Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez, the former anti-kidnapping director of the Specialized Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Organized Crime Investigations.
Mexican officials said earlier this month that a total of 116 people had been tried in the case, according to Prensa Latina.
These include 32 members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, 49 municipal police officers, four federal police officers, three federal ministerial police officers and seven state police officers.
The founder of Guerreros Unidos, Mario Casarruvias Salgado, also known as “The Handsome Toad,” died on July 25, 2021 at the military hospital in Mexico City.
Maria de los Angeles Pineda, the wife of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, was described as the mastermind of the Guerreros Unidos cartel at the time of the massacre.
Pineda was known as the cartel’s “boss of bosses” and according to one version of events, she ordered the cartel and corrupt local police to kidnap the student protesters to prevent them from disrupting a celebration she was planning in the city.
She wanted to “teach them a lesson,” prosecutors claimed after her 2014 arrest.
Her husband Abarca was also charged in the massacre, but the charges were unexpectedly dropped in May.
Abarca was acquitted not only of the kidnapping charge, but also of the organized crime charge, as prosecutors failed to prove that he belonged to Guerreros Unidos.
However, a judge sentenced Abarca to 92 years in prison for several unrelated aggravated kidnappings that occurred a year earlier, and he remains behind bars.
Felipe Rodriguez Salgado, also known as “The Brush,” was another alleged leader of the Guerreros Unidos cartel who was arrested in 2015 in connection with the disappearance of the 43 students.
Charges were also filed against at least 14 members of the National Defense Secretariat.
In the Iguala area where the students were abducted, ties between the military and criminals date back to at least 2013.
According to a court document reported by the Associated Press, military officials helped a local cartel with weapons and training its hitmen.
According to the statement of a detained criminal suspect, Captain Jose Martínez Crespo, arrested in 2020, received money from a leader of the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos to help them transport weapons.
“He used his vehicles to move freely through the region,” the witness said.