Chilpancingo, Mexico.– A federal judge granted Brigadier General José Rodríguez Pérez, former commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala, the benefit of provisional release on Saturday for his alleged links to the criminal group Guerreros Unidos, responsible for the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students.
After one year, 9 months and 22 days of being deprived of his freedom, Raquel Duarte Cedillo, Second District Judge in Federal Criminal Proceedings of Toluca, cancelled the General’s justified preventive detention and imposed four precautionary measures, reported judicial sources.
The judge set out the obligations for him to carry out his case: to appear every two weeks to sign the book of defendants in the court, to be prohibited from leaving the country and from approaching victims and witnesses, and to pay a guarantee of 50 thousand pesos.
In a hearing that concluded today at 5:00 a.m., Duarte concluded that he did not see any well-founded reasons to impose preventive detention, since today the risk that the soldier could flee is no longer justified.
The decision was largely based on the fact that the risk assessment submitted by the National Guard to the court establishes that the eventual provisional release of the General poses a low risk to victims, witnesses and even to his evading justice.
Rodríguez Pérez was expected to leave the Military Camp Number 1 prison later this Saturday, where he had been held since September 14, 2022, the date on which he voluntarily surrendered to the authorities to face justice.
With the general’s release, the only military personnel remaining in prison for charges related to the Ayotzinapa case are Captain José Martínez Crespo; Second Lieutenant Fabián Alejandro Pirita Ochoa and First Infantry soldiers Eduardo Mota Esquivel and Francisco Narváez Pérez.
The General is on trial because the Attorney General’s Office accuses him of being on the payroll of the drug trafficking organization Guerreros Unidos.
The accusation is based on statements made by protected witnesses such as Gildardo López Astudillo “El Gil”, operator of the criminal gang with the code name “Juan”, who accused him of providing protection to traffickers and of having arrested and released one of their leaders, Mario Casarrubias Salgado, who died in prison from Covid-19 on July 26, 2021.
In the report submitted on August 26, 2022 by the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case, the then Undersecretary of the Interior Alejandro Encinas accused Rodríguez Pérez of having ordered the execution of 6 of the 43 normalistas who disappeared in Iguala.
However, the former official’s version does not exist in the investigations that the FGR presented to the federal court, to obtain the arrest warrant against the General, who in 2014, when the disappearance of the students occurred, had the rank of Colonel.
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