“The truth is never sad. What has no remedy.” Joan Manuel Serrat
The explanation was intelligent and forceful. The Truth Commission determined that the historical truth about the events in Iguala was a simple smokescreen to hide a State crime. The only problem is that the tests have been false. “Every investigation has its successes and failures,” Alejandro Encinas, president of the commission, told the New York Times. Here the failures, however, are overwhelming.
One of the fundamental parts of the new truth was some supposed WhatsApp messages that showed the involvement of high-ranking Army commanders in the kidnapping and murder of the Ayotzinapa normalistas. Perhaps Encinas himself doubted their veracity, because they were completely crossed out in the version of the report that he released on August 18. When uncensored versions were later released, they showed a version of what happened radically different from the historical truth. It was understood why Encinas had declared on August 18, echoing the Ayotzinapa movement: “It was the State.”
At least some of the messages have been dismissed as suspected fake. “They don’t have enough elements to confirm them,” Encinas told the Times. Were they forged? “Anything is possible,” he notes. “There is no 100 percent guarantee.”
Other tests have been dropped as well. Encinas maintained that Tomás Zerón, who was head of the Criminal Investigation Agency of the Jesús Murillo Karam Attorney General’s Office, had the secrets to uncover a great conspiracy to hide what happened with the normalistas.
That is why Encinas visited him in Israel, where he has requested political asylum, and offered him a “criterion of opportunity”: reduce his possible punishment by declaring what the government wanted to hear. Encinas told him that he had the “support of the president,” according to a recording seen by the Times. “The president doesn’t want to put anyone in jail.” It was a tempting offer; Zerón, after all, could be sentenced to 60 years in prison if he is found guilty. “He refused to accept it,” Encinas declared on August 18. “I hope he’s still thinking about it.”
Encinas does not understand why Zerón has not betrayed his superiors, but perhaps the reason is that there is nothing to hide. Liora Turlevsky, Zerón’s lawyer, told the Times that the meeting between Encinas and Zerón shows “that the accusations against my client are a serious slander and witch hunt that was carried out for internal political interests.”
The other accusations concocted by Encinas and the special prosecutor Omar Gómez Trejo have also crumbled. The Attorney General’s Office withdrew 21 of the 83 arrest warrants issued on August 19. Encinas publicly accused Brigadier General José Rodríguez Pérez, former commander of the 21st Infantry Battalion of Iguala, of having ordered the murder of six normalistas, but when the formal accusations were presented, the murders were no longer included. He has been prosecuted for protecting members of organized crime, but apparently the only evidence is hearsay from a “collaborating witness,” Gildardo López Astudillo, who had previously confessed to having ordered the killing of the students.
Not surprisingly, Encinas is now forced to acknowledge the weakness of his evidence. Many seemed implausible from the beginning. The problem is that the López Obrador government is left with two versions of what happened in Iguala: the “historical truth” and the “false truth.”
704,358
In 2020 and 2021, an excess mortality of 704,358 people was recorded from all causes (estimates of endemic channels from Inegi). It is the human cost of a pandemic that the Undersecretary of Health considered would not be as dangerous as influenza.
#false #truth