The Undersecretary of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, who heads the Truth and Justice Commission for the Ayotzinapa Case, is in a hole from which it will be difficult to get out. In an extraordinary, unusual interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that the WhatsApp chats in which he supported the demolition of the “historical truth” of the government of Enrique Peña Nieto about the disappearance of the 43 normalistas in 2014, did not could be verified as real. I mean, they’re fake. “There are some that we have discarded,” he told the newspaper. “They do not have enough elements to prove themselves.” The source that gave him the chats, cell phone screenshots, Encinas admitted, could have fabricated them.
The chats were essential to present the alternative truth to the investigation of the Peña Nieto government, which is about which Encinas weaved the new narrative to involve the military with the hitmen of Guerreros Unidos, and accuse them of being part of the criminal structure to disappear. the normalistas and assassinate them. Four military chiefs are imprisoned for this accusation, including the then chief of the 27th Infantry Battalion, today General José Rodríguez. The accusation against the military was authorized by the president, to whom he showed the “evidence” of him. Today it can be affirmed that he lied to the president and that he triggered a confrontation with the Army based on lies.
In the interview with the Times, Encinas pointed out that much of what was presented as crucial new evidence could not be verified as real. “There is an important percentage, very important, that is all invalidated,” he said. The newspaper noted that “the extraordinary admission —along with a review of government documents, a hitherto unpublished recording and interviews with people involved in the investigation— indicate how the government’s rush to provide answers resulted in a series of setbacks: a truth commission that relied on unsubstantiated evidence and a criminal investigation that deprived the prosecution of key suspects.”
At the end of his investigation, Encinas obtained what seemed to be a breakthrough, a set of 467 screenshots that the Guerreros Unidos criminals allegedly exchanged with members of the Army and local officials, the newspaper noted. The alleged messages were released by Encinas in a morning, to refute criticism of the report that the Commission released days before, which did not contribute anything new. Of those novelties, he admits, much was fake.
On October 4, the first doubts about the veracity of WhatsApp were raised in this space. “The clearest and most convincing way to see the involvement of the Army… is the most opaque and fragile part of the investigation by the presidential commission headed by… Encinas,” he pointed out. “It is about the 45 chats of members of… Guerreros Unidos… that describe with inhuman crudeness the way in which they killed and disposed of the bodies of young people, and directly involve commanders of the 27th Infantry Battalion of Iguala, with which Encinas annihilated the historical truth of the previous government. However, he faces a major obstacle: they lack technical support and forensic expertise, which has led to doubts, within the current government, as to whether the chats are actually real.
“Officials from two of the agencies involved are convinced that the chats are false and were invented within the presidential commission. The argument that the officials have has to do with the water tests that are incorporated into the WhatsApp screen as the original background, where it has perfectly recognizable icons, such as a chair, a backpack, a guitar, a scooter or an astronaut, among others. . These figures are fixed in the same place and are not repeated. The screenshots presented by the Encinas report have icons in different positions and in some cases they are duplicated”.
The Times pointed out that a package with 467 screenshots that was delivered by a single source, and did not share them with the Attorney General’s Office, despite the fact that forensic analyzes could have been carried out in that agency to verify the authenticity of the messages, “because he was worried they would leak.” This statement, in itself, is a confession of crime. Encinas is not a public prosecutor, so he violated article 250 of the Penal Code for usurpation of functions, which carries a penalty of one to six years in prison.
These deficiencies and technical insufficiencies did not lead Encinas to question the veracity of the WhatsApp, although under his command was Omar Gómez Trejo, special prosecutor for the case and who had been technical secretary of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, the GIEI, that knowing what was required to verify it, he let the undersecretary accuse the military. No one on the presidential commission did additional work: in order to have been able to build the narrative that he presented to incriminate the criminals, he would have had to have had six cell phones. He had none and created at his source.
“In all investigations there are hits and misses,” Encinas told the Times. True, but there are errors to errors. In 1994, the first prosecutor of the Colosio Case, Miguel Montes, affirmed from a video that there had been a “concerted action” to assassinate presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Spanish experts who were advising him showed him his mistake, and he submitted his resignation. Unlike that mistake, where Montes and his team did not violate the law, Encinas committed flagrant crimes, against the administration of justice and a possible criminal lawsuit from the accused military for non-pecuniary damage.
Sooner or later he will be before a judge, because the probable impunity that López Obrador will extend to him is finite. Encinas does not have the moral quality of Montes, but he should resign. Yet he hasn’t even realized the size of his mistake, as evidenced by his claim to the Times that his investigation is backed by other solid evidence—except that it was going to change the truth about the Ayotzinapa Case.
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