José Rodríguez is a venerable man in his 70s who retired four years ago after decades of hard work without a single stain on his record. Since then, Rodríguez spent his days of well-deserved rest playing with his grandchildren. Until at the beginning of September, an unfortunate misunderstanding placed him on the target of Justice and, in a gesture of good faith, he decided to surrender voluntarily to respond to accusations of organized crime.
This is the only account known in Mexico of the biography of General Rodríguez, the highest-ranking military man prosecuted by the Ayotzinapa case. The disappearance of 43 students eight years ago is one of the most traumatic episodes in the country’s recent history. The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which has led a thorough review of the case, qualifies it as a “state crime”, which has caused a stir in the corners of Mexican power.
Before retiring, Rodríguez was the commander of the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala, the city where the events took place. That is, the head of the barracks with hundreds of soldiers under his charge. Some of whom are also imprisoned for allegedly participating in the disappearance of the students in a macabre alliance with organized crime.
The few white details that have emerged about the general come from an interview published this week in the Mexican press. From the visiting room of a military prison, the general denies everything: “There is no evidence”, “I found out later”, “the institution is supporting me”. The interview has also become increasingly controversial because the general’s answers were amplified by the official channels of the Army almost like corporate information.
The protection fence and the opacity around the general is maximum. To the point that there are no available photographs of Rodríguez, and some media have mistakenly published the portrait of the soldier who was not him. Rodríguez has been specifically accused of being the intellectual author of the murder of six of the 43 students. The Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, who has led the presidential commission that is investigating the case in parallel to the courts, announced that Rodríguez was in contact with the criminals at all times.
Even more detailed: the soldier kept a part of the boys captive for days and on September 30 he ordered their murder. They are the most serious accusations against the Mexican Army in decades, only comparable to the atrocities committed during the Dirty War of the seventies. With the difference that this time it is not about any dark conspiracy for political purposes. The cause behind the horror would now be the corrupt drug money.
His defense strategy focuses on presenting the accusations against him as an artifice based exclusively on the statements of a single witness. Specifically, one of the assassins of the criminal gang involved, Guerreros Unidos. Arrested in 2015 but later released after having shown torture by the police, Gildardo López Astudillo, alias El Gil, has been sheltering since 2020 a figure similar to that of the protected collaborating witness of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Contrary to what is alleged by his defense, the commission’s investigation, however, includes statements from more members of the criminal gang that point to General Rodríguez. The details come from the intervention of calls by the Prosecutor’s Office and the National Guard. And on the other, of almost 500 screenshots of WhatsApp messages received on the phones “of five of the alleged actors within the 35 characters involved in the case,” the report points out. According to these messages, to which EL PAÍS has had access, at least four alleged assassins identified as El Chino, el Chango, la Gorda and el Negro mention the figure of the general or even maintain direct communication with him.
“We are going to clean everything”
In the intercepted communications, Rodríguez is presumably identified as the Colonel. In his interview with the press, he states that they did not intervene that night of September 26 until they were informed that “there were armed people in a hospital.” By then the boys had already arrived in Iguala and had hijacked three buses at the municipal terminal. They intended to travel to the October 2 march in the capital. But they never made it to Mexico City because they were intercepted at different points in the city of Iguala by the criminal alliance of police and hit men, who allegedly mistook them for members of a rival gang.
According to his own statements, Rodríguez sends a special contingent of soldiers to the hospital, the so-called reaction force. But before going to that point, the person in charge of the special team, infantry captain José Martínez Crespo, goes through some of the scenes of the attacks. Identified in the messages as Captain Crespo, at 11:27 p.m. he communicates with one of the assassins, El Chino, to tell him that he is going “to the municipal base to check if there are any detained students.” Half an hour later he confirms that “at the municipal base we did not find anyone and the trucks were thoroughly checked.”
A few minutes later, and in another part of the city where more attacks took place, Captain Crespo notified Chino again by message that “there are two asshole students lying here on Álvarez corner. They are almost dead already. I’m going to let them die alone here, let them be guarded and then we’ll report it.” These two communications are the first that would support the version of the ties between, at least part of the Army, and the criminal gang. As well as the flagrant crime of omission of relief. Captain José Martínez Crespo was one of the first soldiers arrested and since November 2019, he has been in prison for alleged links with Guerreros Unidos.
At 6 in the morning “our work is finished”, according to the general in his interview. However, two days after the events, on September 28, several communications between the assassins point to a deeper involvement of the 27 Battalion of Iguala and in particular of the Colonel, alleged alias of Rodríguez. “The orders come from Mexico from above to clean everything and do everything their way and hang the medal,” reads the messages verbatim in relation to a plot allegedly orchestrated by different levels of Mexican power, from the Prosecutor’s Office, police, power city and military. In conclusion, the assassins seem worried that they will end up being the ones to pay for everything: “The colonel and his people cannot be stained.”
That same day, Captain Crespo tells Chino to “don’t rush it” because “no one enters the military camp. After a while we see where we put them, I already ordered some things to be cleaned”. This message would support the hypothesis that, at least, some of the bodies could have been hidden inside the military headquarters of the 27th Battalion of Iguala, whose highest authority at that time was General Rodríguez. The next day, in another of the messages, Chino tells la Gorda that a hawk saw Negro enter the barracks with the military chief: “They saw Negro with the Colonel and they were going as if nothing had happened. The paletero told me that he got into there, at 27 ″.
The report of the presidential commission even includes screenshots of messages that General Rodríguez would have sent directly to the phone of one of the assassins. On September 30, four days after the events, he argues with Chino over what appear to be differences in the payment of the agreed-upon money for collaborating in the crime. “We all had at the funeral but pay what you promised. Don’t want to go overboard.”
That conversation seems to conclude, however, in an agreement. The soldier tells him that they will take care of “cleaning everything” and also of the six students who remained, according to the same narrative derived from the reconstruction of the events, kidnapped in a warehouse: “We will take care of those,” the officer replies. general.
In full flow of information and news about the Ayotizinapa case, this same week the group of experts that the IACHR has commissioned to Mexico to investigate the event (GIEI) also published its conclusions. International experts question the veracity of the messages collected by the commission, in the absence of a thorough digital expert opinion. But at the same time, the GIEI has revealed other messages compiled by the DEA office in Chicago, which has investigated the transfer of drugs from Iguala to the US, organized by Guerrero Unidos and his network during the last decade. And the conclusion of these new intercepted communications follows the same line: a corrupt alliance between criminals and the Army, the Navy, the police and municipal politicians.
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