It was August 1996. The investigation of the cases Colosio, Ruiz Massieu and Posadas was already in chaos. The special prosecutor Pablo Chapa Bezanilla was uusing any instrument to try to square the hypotheses that, reflected in the arrests, he had made in the first year and a half as the person in charge of those investigations and that they tried to verify that the person in charge of those deaths was former President Carlos Salinas.
In the Ruiz-Massieu case, decided to imprison Raúl Salinas, he had no evidence other than the hearsay testimony of one of those responsible for the crime, but he filled some media, as is being done now, with leaks, which were also not verified and did not have much to do with the case, but which served to strengthen that image in public opinion. In the Colosio case, dismissed the previous investigations, but somehow returned to that of prosecutor Miguel Montes, really disastrous, incorporating members of the Presidential General Staff and above all who was the head of security, General Domiro García Reyes. For that he arrested a poor assistant, Othón Cortés, who spent several years in Almoloya, until he was declared innocent.
When the book Domiro was going to come out, which we published in 1996 with my friend Joaquín López Dóriga, with the testimony of García Reyes, President Ernesto Zedillo summoned me in Los Pinos. As I have published on other occasions, the President, in a long two-hour meeting, told me that he was fed up with Chapa Bezanilla, that he had only created problems for him, that he was corrupt, and that his investigations were not based on data. checked. I then asked him why he was keeping him in office, and President Zedillo told me that it was an appointment by the attorney Antonio Lozano Gracia (who I later found out was also fed up with Chapa Bezanilla by that time but wanted Zedillo to fire him) and he did not he could remove it because he had been given autonomy and, furthermore, because it would appear that he did not want the investigations to progress. It was clear to me that the President Zedillo I was stuck on that topic.
The same is happening to President López Obrador with the case Ayotzinapa. Other special prosecutor, Omar Trejo, without experience or capacity in the matter and strongly influenced by his political positions, he is headed by an undersecretary, such as Alejandro Encinas, who, like Chapa Bezanilla, was given absolute freedom to investigate the case and, as Chapa also did, first established his hypotheses, then he looked for protected witnesses who would make accusations that served that purpose, he issued arrest warrants left and right and then he looked to see how he was able to cross his narrative with evidence. That ended in disaster, and this is going the same way.
President Lopez Obrador has opted for a sort of flight forward, as usual, despite the fact that the investigation of Encinas-Trejo it has caused a train wreck in the federal government and beyond. Encinas, any old Marxist would say, bet on sharpening the contradictions, especially with an institution as distant from his affections since 1968 as the armed forces. Not only did he launch a series of unsubstantiated, unfounded allegations in the report that he released a few weeks ago, but he also added statements that are not even in it, such as that General José Rodríguez Pérez ordered the killing of several young people, days after September 26. Neither does that exist in the report, nor is there an arrest warrant for that alleged crime, much less is there evidence in this regard. It is, as the general told me, “a vile act, a cowardice”, because that very serious accusation when presented as a fact remains in the collective unconscious. So much so, that just yesterday President López Obrador took it up as a fact in the morning.
The viciousness with which the armed forces and in particular the army are attacked from within the federal government itself, with presidential backing, is astonishing, when at the same time it is supposed to strengthen the military presence in various spheres, and expand military participation. in public security, in addition to incorporating the National Guard into the Sedena structure.
One day we will have to understand the level of annoyance that exists in the armed institute due to the baseless accusations, the self-serving leaks, the arrests of soldiers who, like the General Rodriguez Perez never ceases to be amazed that the testimony of a hired assassin, confessed author of the disappearance of the young people from Ayotzinapahave more weight than his career of 44 years of service, his impeccable resume, than his own testimony of what happened that night.
The divisions that this has generated within the federal government are not minor. Omar Trejo would be about to leave the special prosecutor’s office (where he should never have been because he was an interested party), Encinas would have differences with him and now also with the Prosecutor Gertz Manero due to the withdrawn arrest warrants, the issue has generated divisions among the candidates, because the report is also used in that sense. The Mexican army completely rejects the actions of the commission and the prosecution. President López Obrador supports one and the other at the same time and, in the end, he can end up looking bad for everyone.
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Meanwhile, the violence continues in the streets of these groups that identify with Ayotzinapa but whose agenda has nothing to do with justice, but with the most radical positions of the political spectrum.
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