Page one of the report Escuela Normal Rural “Raúl Isidros Burgos,” produced by the 35th Military Zone’s “Internal Order Analysis Group” in August 2006.
Military Surveilled Ayotzinapa School for Years Before Disappearance of 43 Students
Intelligence Reports Reveal Constant Exchange of Messages During Night of Attacks in Iguala
Mexican Military Continues to Deny Investigators Complete Access to Archives
Washington, D.C., March 10, 2023 - Years before 43 young men from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college were attacked and forcibly disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, the Mexican military had the school under surveillance and considered its students to be subversives, according to internal communications and documents from the Mexican armed forces published today by the National Security Archive.
The military records also reveal that Mexico’s National Defense Ministry worked to shield the institution from civilian scrutiny during the investigation into the disappearance of the 43 students; that military intelligence routinely lumped together dangerous drug traffickers and parents of the missing students in the same reports on “conflict” in Mexico; and that Mexico's Defense Secretary oversaw a propaganda campaign to discredit the parents, their lawyers, and a group of experts assigned to assist in the case by a United Nations commission.
The 20 documents posted by the Archive today are among an estimated four million emails and records that were stolen from the Mexican Defense Ministry (Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional—Sedena) by an anonymous collective of hackers known as “Guacamaya.” Following Guacamaya’s leak of the massive data set in late September 2022, journalists in Mexico and elsewhere have used the six terabytes of information to publish a steady stream of breaking-news stories about diverse topics, including:
As part of the National Security Archive’s long-term investigative project on the Ayotzinapa case (and the podcast we co-produced with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting), the Archive has spent months examining the data set for references to the Ayotzinapa School, the night of the attacks in Iguala, the disappearance of the students, and the investigations that followed. Today's posting is an initial selection of documents from this data set intended to give our readers a sense of what we are learning about the Mexican military’s internal communications related to Ayotzinapa.
The records reveal that the Mexican armed forces were closely monitoring the Ayotzinapa School long before 43 of its students disappeared in 2014. In a 2006 secret intelligence report from the headquarters of the 35th Military Zone (based in Chilpancingo, the state capital of Guerrero), the school is described as a breeding ground for “subversives,” which, “from its beginnings [in 1926] was identified with social groups antagonistic to the government.” The military’s language on Ayotzinapa is the language of counterinsurgency: Due to “the ideological penetration” of foreign ideas, notes the report, “the school has an active and important participation in social conflicts, at the local and national level.” The example given in the report is the armed revolutionary (and Ayotzinapa graduate) Lucio Cabañas, who was assassinated by army forces in 1974 (and who is the subject of a National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book from 2003) [Document 1].
No guerrilla leader has emerged from Ayotzinapa in the nearly 50 years since Cabañas’s death, but multiple military records from the Sedena data set continue to associate not only the school but its teachers, students, alumnae, and diverse supporters with what the military calls “the agrarian conflict.” Networks of individuals and institutions believed “connected” to the school and its mission appear in military intelligence documents, such as a 2007 report showing a “diagram of Ayotzinapa links.” The report identifies a variety of armed groups, well-known journalists, campesino organizations, local politicians, and members of one of the major political parties, the center-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) – including future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador – as Ayotzinapa supporters [Document 2].
Other records, such as the “Itzamna” report's annex on the “Criminal and Social Agenda” in Iguala from April 2020, conflate the “problematics” of organized crime (in this case, Guerreros Unidos – the criminal gang involved in the kidnapping of the Ayotzinapa students) and social movements (in this case, the students themselves and their parents and advisors) in ways that blur the difference between them. Both are perceived as a field of conflict for the military – though criminals are categorized as a “risk” and activists a “challenge” – and both are analyzed and visualized in exactly the same ways: through maps, timelines, links to other groups, and individual profiles of leaders. And the military’s conclusions about both are very similar:
Criminal Dynamic: Projection and lines of action [Slide 44]
Projection: The problem between Guerreros Unidos and the Cartel of the Sierra will continue, since [Iguala] is a location with important corridors for the trafficking of drugs and weapons…
Lines of action, For intelligence organs: Establish points of observation with the aim of obtaining relevant information about the illicit activities in the location and identify the criminal leaders of the plaza…
Social Dynamic: Projection and lines of action [Slide 50]
Projection: Demonstrations by The Students of the [Ayotzinapa] School will continue and intensify with the goal of getting attention from the competent authorities.
Lines of action, For intelligence organs: Deploy the intelligence gathering organs during demonstrations in order to identify the network of supporters and the principal leaders… [Document 16]
The Ayotzinapa case began on September 26, 2014, when a group of students from the school were attacked by security forces and members of a criminal gang as they traveled in buses through the town of Iguala. A night of violence and gunfire left three students and three bystanders dead and dozens of people wounded; 43 students were taken away by police and never seen again. The parents of the missing boys mobilized, calling on then-President Enrique Peña Nieto to find their sons and demanding the government investigate those responsible.
From the beginning, questions were raised as to the actions of the Mexican military during the attacks. Iguala hosts a major army installation – the headquarters of the 27th Military Infantry Battalion – and soldiers were seen circulating throughout the various crime scenes as the violence unfolded for hours, from the evening of September 26 into the early morning of September 27. When international investigators loaned by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights to assist in the case (known as the group of experts, Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes—GIEI) asked to interview soldiers from the battalion, then-Secretary of Defense Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda refused, telling the press: “I can’t permit my soldiers to be treated like criminals or to be interrogated so that they are later made to feel that they had something to do with [the night of Iguala] instead of being supported.”
Emails and internal memos found in the Sedena data set make clear why the experts and other investigators wanted to question the military. Four documents in this posting are a sampling of the communications that passed among members of the 27th Infantry Battalion and between the battalion and the 35th Military Zone in Chilpancingo during and immediately after the attacks [Documents 4-7]. As the Parte de Novedades (“Report of latest developments”) from that night indicates, there was constant movement on and off base by soldiers of the 27th battalion, including by those who would later become key suspects in the investigation. Yet testimonies from surviving students and eyewitnesses agreed that the military never intervened to stop the violence or rescue the students.[1]
Captain José Martínez Crespo, for example, a unit leader at the time, was patrolling Iguala from 12:30 to 5:55am, hours during which a second violent attack took place in the center of town, leaving the bodies of two students lying in the streets [Document 7]. According to a message written by battalion commander Col. José Rodríguez Pérez, at one point, Capt. Martínez Crespo and his men entered a medical clinic called Cristina to locate a group of students – one of whom was badly wounded – and later reported that the boys “expressed their gratitude to [him] for the support rendered, saying they did not wish to remain in that place anymore; that they would leave, and they would give their wounded companion the medical attention he needed themselves” [Document 5]. Interviews with students who survived that night tell a very different story, with Martínez Crespo berating the boys and refusing to help them get medical attention.[2]
Martínez Crespo was arrested in November 2020 on suspicion of involvement with Guerreros Unidos, the criminal group that participated in the attack on the boys and that may have killed them. The retired officer is now being held in a federal prison awaiting trial. Although the current Defense Minister, Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval, has publicly cooperated with the arrest of Martínez Crespo [Document 18], he has also communicated privately and directly with President López Obrador about the difficulties the retired officer is experiencing in prison - describing him as “depressed” but “firm in his determination that his innocence must be recognized” [Document 19].
As soon as the group of international experts arrived in Mexico in early 2015, they began to find major inconsistencies in the government’s version of the crimes – a version that came to be known as the “historical truth” (la verdad histórica). Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and his chief investigator Tomás Zerón described coordinated actions between corrupt local police and criminals to kidnap the students, bring them to a garbage dump in the nearby municipality of Cocula, kill them, and burn their bodies overnight into ash and tiny fragments of bone. The GIEI’s findings challenged almost every aspect of the official story – including the government’s failure to investigate the role of the armed forces, a demand the parents had made immediately after their sons went missing.
Records in the leaked Sedena data set reveal the extent to which the Defense Ministry sought to circle the wagons and fend off any attempt at turning the inquiry on the military itself. When the parents and their lawyers requested access to the Iguala headquarters of the 27th battalion in early 2015, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Cienfuegos counseled that if there were jail cells there, “it’s necessary to remove them and take them off base” before any outsiders visit; furthermore, if asked, the commander should not permit any kind of excavation or removal of flooring [Document 8]. Shortly after the GIEI released their first damaging report in September 2015, that same advisor – Humberto Guillermo Aguilar, a retired three-star general – suggested that the parents and their supporters were trying to reopen the investigation as a way of “buying time until 2018, so that the Federal Government will be facing a problem it has been unable to resolve, and in that manner they seek to discredit the PRI-Government in the presidential elections” [Document 9].
Although these internal memos repeatedly declare the military’s commitment to supporting the investigation, they also express fury and disbelief that five foreigners could be allowed to intervene in a case as sensitive as Ayotzinapa. Military and civilian advisors call the members of the GIEI “supposed experts”; their work is characterized as “foreign meddling” [Document 14]; and they frame the GIEI’s efforts to communicate their findings outside Mexico as “illegal” and “unjustified” [Document 12].
According to the documents, the military used a covert strategy to undermine the GIEI and any others who questioned the “historical truth.” The Sedena data set contains evidence that the highest levels of the Defense Ministry ordered and oversaw a propaganda campaign targeting not only the group of experts, but the parents of the disappeared 43 students and their lawyers. In a memorandum to Cienfuegos written in 2016, Juan Ibarrola Carreón – a columnist with Milenio and paid consultant to the Mexican military – repeats accusations published in several Mexican news outlets about two members of the GIEI. The articles claim that Claudia Paz y Paz – “when she was a judge in Guatemala” [she was attorney general] – had deep ties to leftist guerrilla organizations in Central America, and Ángela Buitrago – a former federal prosecutor from Colombia – fabricated evidence to put a high-ranking Colombian military officer in prison.
Paz y Paz and Buitrago, Ibarrola reminds Cienfuegos, “are the ones insisting on interrogating the military for the Iguala case.” The Milenio columnist suggests that Sedena ask the Colombian defense attaché in Mexico for more information about Buitrago, “so that at the right time it can be fully documented and disseminated in a strategic manner within Mexico” [Document 11].
Following publication of the second and final report of the GIEI – which found the military was withholding information about what happened in Iguala – the Intelligence Directorate of the National Defense General Staff concluded that the Defense Ministry needed to influence public opinion more aggressively. The unidentified intelligence officer recommended that Sedena: “leak a narrative to friendly opinion leaders that confirms the ministry’s position”; continue an “exhaustive monitoring” of media for negative articles; “interact with simulated users” on social media sites; carry out “propaganda campaigns against the members of GIEI”; and spread messages against the leaders of the parents of the 43 disappeared boys [Document 13].
In 2018, President López Obrador reopened the Ayotzinapa case and ordered his government agencies to cooperate with the new investigation. In particular, the president required the Defense Ministry to respond to requests for information from the reconstituted group of international experts. The GIEI has since had access to some military installations, such as the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala. They have also been given partial access to military archives. However, according to the GIEI’s recent reports and press conferences, even the president’s order has not forced the Defense Ministry to turn over all the records GIEI believes exists about the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43. While the families wait, perhaps in vain, for the military to open its files, today’s posting offers a glimpse of what we are learning from the leaked Sedena data set and provides some illuminating details about what the Mexican military was saying and doing behind closed doors.
On redactions:
In giving the National Security Archive access to this collection, the Guacamaya collective and its partners Enlace Hacktivista and DDoSecrets requested that the documents be shared responsibly. The Archive has thus redacted portions of documents that contain private and personal information.
On formatting inconsistencies and translations:
All documents in this collection have been reproduced as they appear originally. Any variance in formatting is due to technical limitations in the conversion of the documents from their original formats to the Archive’s own format specifications. All translations from the original Spanish to English are by the Archive.
Document 1
This intelligence report makes clear that the Mexican military was closely monitoring the Ayotzinapa School long before the 43 students were forcibly disappeared in 2014. Produced by the 35th Military Zone’s “Internal Order Analysis Group” (Grupo de Análisis de Orden Interno–GAOI), the report contains detailed intelligence on the school’s structure, activities, and perceived political goals. Ayotzinapa is characterized as “rebellious,” “antagonistic to the government,” and a “sower of subversion.” The school is said to allow the “ideological penetration of foreign ideas” that are “opposed to the harmonious development of the country.” According to the report, in addition to its normal class schedule, the school organized clandestine activities such as the teaching of counterintelligence techniques to help students identify military infiltrators.
Document 2
These two diagrams from GAOI intelligence analysts in the 35th Military Zone (MZ) to “Capt. Leonel” of the DN-2 (National Directorate of Intelligence) identify a network of individuals and organizations linked to the Ayotzinapa School in late 2007. The military produced the diagrams after the violent police evacuation of students who were occupying the Guerrero State Congress in protest of the lack of resources for the school. Among identified sympathizers - according to the military - are local politicians from the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD), leftist armed groups, some members of the media (including La Jornada’s Sergio Ocampo), and, interestingly, Alejandro Encinas and the future president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Document 3
This detailed citizen complaint sent five months before the “night of Iguala” describes criminal gangs operating “with impunity” in Teloloapan and Cocula (the same region of Guerrero as Iguala), setting up roadblocks in order to rob people and entering town centers with AK-47s. The complaint states that “this isn’t a narcotrafficking cartel, it’s a gang of highway robbers, thieves and kidnappers.” The source tells the military the date and time that a criminal leader known as “El Pez” would soon be in public, adding, “That day could be an important one for the federal authorities if they organize a good operation to capture or kill this criminal who has caused so much damage to thousands of people in Guerrero and Michoacán.” The overall message of the complaint is: “Why don’t you DO something?!”
Document 4
Arrival of the Normalistas. This is one of the earliest reports we’ve found tracking the students’ movements on the night they disappeared. The commander of the 27th Military Infantry Battalion (MB) (based in Iguala), Col. José Rodríguez Pérez, informs the 35th Military Zone of the arrival of students in the vicinity of Iguala to collect funds and look for buses to seize. At 9:20pm, he reports, a group of students arrived at the town’s central bus station and commandeered two buses. Members of the municipal police followed them “to prevent them from taking away the buses,” according to the report, and when students “attacked the police with stones,” the police “responded to the aggression by shooting their guns.” The document includes the observations of OBIs (intelligence units known as Órganos de Búsqueda de Información), which reported “detonations between police and occupants of one bus” [emphasis added].
Document 5
Addition. Col. Rodríguez Pérez follows up on his earlier messages about how the night is unfolding in and around Iguala, informing the 35th MZ command of the chaotic scene found at the Santa Teresa crossroads by an army “Reaction Force” (Fuerza de Reacción–FR) sent to investigate news of violent attacks. The unit found two taxis riddled with bullets and a middle-aged woman’s body lying three meters from one of them, shot in the face. A “Castro Tours” passenger bus that had been run off the road also had multiple bullet holes. Outside the bus were 20 young people [a local youth soccer team called the Avispones], who said that one of their teammates had been killed. Members of the Federal Police were present and “investigating.” The military Reaction Force went to the General Hospital in Iguala and found 13 people with various gunshot wounds being treated.
[The National Security Archive has redacted portions of this record that contain personal or private information.]
Document 6
[This message refers to a group of students who fled the shooting in Iguala center and found temporary refuge inside a medical clinic called “Cristina.” One of the boys had been shot in the face and they were desperate for a doctor’s assistance. According to multiple testimonies, not only did the resident doctor refuse to attend to the student, he notified the military of their presence. When a patrol from the 27th MB arrived, led by Capt. Martínez Crespo, the soldiers scolded and harangued the boys, suggesting that if they didn’t leave immediately, they would disappear. The students were forced to flee the clinic and continue to look for shelter and medical attention elsewhere.]
Col. Rodríguez Pérez tells the 35th MZ that, “The 25 students found inside Hospital Cristina expressed their gratitude to Cap. 2o José Martínez Crespo for the support rendered, saying they did not wish to remain in that place anymore; that they would leave, and they would give their wounded companion the medical attention he needed themselves.” The report includes a list of journalists who showed up at the scene (including Sergio Ocampo) and the name of a student activist who gave an interview.
Document 7
Latest Developments. This is an army report on the latest developments in Iguala covering September 26-27 and was submitted by Captain José Martínez Crespo. This type of routine military document logs traffic entering and exiting military installations (in this case the 27th Military Infantry Battalion in Iguala) and records bureaucratic issues such as vacations taken by soldiers, sanctions imposed on soldiers, notable visitors, etc.
Among the exits documented: Lt. Roberto Vázquez Hernández left the base at 10:55am to assist at the site of a highway accident and returned at 8:00pm “without incident.” At 1:25pm, Cmdr. José Rodríguez Pérez, left the base “en comisión del servicio,” returning at 3:00pm. At 5:40pm, Capt. Paul Escobar López went out to attend the annual report of DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familias) presented by municipal President María de los Ángeles Pineda de Abarca, returning at 6:15pm. At 11:20pm, Lt. Vázquez went to the General Hospital to gather information. At 11:50pm Lt. Vásquez left again to patrol “just outside this city,” returning at 3:10am. Capt. Martínez Crespo left the base for patrols around the city at 12:30am, returning at 5:55am “without incident.”
[The bolded names are people who would later become suspects in the investigations and who feature in emerging narratives about what happened to the boys.]
[The National Security Archive has redacted portions of this record that contain personal or private information.]
Document 8
Retired Army General Humberto A. Guillermo Aguilar, former head of the General Staff (Estado Mayor) of the Defense Ministry and then-advisor to Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos, warns the defense secretary that Ayotzinapa parents and their advisors want to visit the military installation of the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala not because they believe the students were taken there, but “with the goal of destabilizing the current government and forcing the Army back to the barracks.” Gen. Guillermo Aguilar writes that this “is the strategy of the Mexican left and organized crime, to show the incompetence of the government and cast doubt on its performance.” The military advisor recommends that soldiers from the 27th stick to the “official version” of what happened on September 26, 2014; dismantle and remove any existing detention cells on the base before the visit; and refuse to allow any kind of excavation or removal of concrete flooring, arguing that there are no signs of disturbed ground anywhere on the installation.
Document 9
In a commentary that reflects the Defense Ministry’s heightened awareness of the damage that the Ayotzinapa case had inflicted on the Peña Nieto government, this memo by Gen. Guillermo Aguilar expresses his belief that there is a political angle to the social movement demanding justice for the families of the 43. The military advisor first praises the President for meeting with the parents on the first anniversary of the disappearances, noting especially his “level-headedness” in ignoring what Aguilar calls their verbal aggressions and provocations. He affirms the solidity of the “historical truth” theory of the case and says any assertion of alternative facts will be branded as hypothesis - “simple suppositions.” Finally, Gen. Guillermo Aguilar notes that the parents’ demands to launch a new investigation is a way of “buying time until 2018, so that the Federal Government will be facing a problem it has been unable to resolve, and in that manner they seek to discredit the PRI-Government in the presidential elections.”
Document 10
Gen. Guillermo Aguilar complains to Defense Secretary Cienfuegos about the government’s agreement to renew the mandate of the five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes–GIEI) in Mexico for another six months, a decision that he says will only permit them an opportunity for “greater meddling in the investigations of the PGR.”
Document 11
Juan Ibarrola Carreón, a journalist with Milenio who is also a paid consultant to the Mexican military, sends Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos an analysis of recent articles in La Razón, Excelsior, and El Economista that accuse two members of the GIEI of impropriety, naming a conservative Mexican organization as the source of the information. The articles claimed that Claudia Paz y Paz - “when she was a judge in Guatemala” [she was never a judge but was Attorney General] - had deep ties to leftist guerrilla organizations in Central America and held criminal trials based on false evidence and invented testimonies. The articles further claimed that Ángela Buitrago - a former federal prosecutor from Colombia - fabricated evidence to put a high-ranking Colombian military officer in prison. Paz y Paz and Buitrago, the journalist reminds Cienfuegos, “are the ones insisting on interrogating the military for the Iguala case.”
In his recommendations, Ibarrola suggests that Sedena ask the Colombian defense attaché in Mexico for all relevant information about the claims against Buitrago, “so that at the right time it can be fully documented and disseminated in a strategic manner within Mexico.” Ibarrola also proposes that he personally make an approach to the conservative organization, “so as to avoid directly associating it with the institution” - in other words, the Defense Ministry.
Document 12
Retired diplomat Sergio González Gálvez, a civilian advisor to Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos, writes an angry memorandum about GIEI members Carlos Beristain and Claudia Paz y Paz’s appearance before a committee of the European Union in Brussels “to pressure our Government.” In the document marked “Extra Urgent Classified,” the former ambassador rails against their critique of the Mexican government’s investigations into Ayotzinapa, calling their appeal to the EU for support “illegal” and “unjustified.” He adds, “Clearly this and other actions by the members of GIEI disqualify that group and confirm our interest in not renewing their mandate under any circumstance in April.”
Document 13
This report from the intelligence division of the National Defense General Staff (Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional–EMDN) summarizes the “most relevant aspects” of the GIEI’s final report, delivered at a press conference on April 24, 2016, and assesses the implications for the Defense Ministry. The author focuses exclusively on the comments of Claudia Paz y Paz who, as he writes, “stated in an insidious manner” the GIEI’s observations about the military and the Ayotzinapa case. In the author’s estimation, the GIEI introduced no new evidence to undermine the Defense Ministry’s position and their findings will have no negative impact on the military. His conclusions make clear, however, that he believes the Defense Ministry still needs to influence public opinion. He recommends that the military leak “a narrative to friendly opinion leaders that confirms the ministry’s position,” continue with “exhaustive monitoring” of media for negative articles, “interact with simulated users” on social media sites, carry out “propaganda campaigns against the members of GIEI,” and spread messages against actions taken by the leaders of the parents of the 43.
Document 14
As the GIEI prepare to leave the country, the advisor to Defense Secretary Cienfuegos, Amb. Sergio González Gálvez, writes a highly critical memo about their work in Mexico. In evaluating what he calls the “conflict” generated by the group, González recommends that, in the future, the government reject any form of “foreign meddling” in Mexican human rights affairs. According to González, the “supposed experts” were given too much freedom by the agreement that permitted them in the country, abused their budgets by granting themselves enormous salaries and staff, and used the press as a mouthpiece for their messages. Mexican officials should also stop saying they will comply with the recommendations of the GIEI, “which I believe and maintain is not appropriate for the interests of the nation.”
Document 15
This is a tutorial on the flow of intelligence information from the S-2 “Pelotones de Información” (Information Squads or Platoons) belonging to operational units of the 35th Military Zone (based in Chilpancingo, Guerrero). In addition to basic instruction about the type of information to obtain, which social upheavals or problems to examine, and technical ways to securely communicate, the tutorial reminds agents that the institutional well-being [of the military] “must be the fundamental premise of the work of S.I.M. (Sistema de Inteligencia Militar) personnel.” The tutorial says there are “systematic attacks against the institution” and reminds intelligence personnel that “we are all part of it, even when in civilian clothing.”
The document identifies the Ayotzinapa School and the parents of the 43 disappeared students as prime examples of social mobilization groups to monitor, with individual profiles containing personal as well as professional information on prominent activists and relatives involved in the Ayotzinapa case.
[The National Security Archive has redacted portions of this record that contain personal or private information.]
Document 16
The “Itzamna” report appears to be a regular intelligence product of the Mexican military. (We have found several of them while examining the data set.) They normally start like tourist brochures - with slides about geography, demographics, the names and photos of elected political leaders, climate, economy - but quickly become security reviews, covering criminal and social “problems.”
Following the usual statistics, this Itzamna report on Iguala analyzes organized crime, reviewing homicides and other crimes in the first four months of 2020. Six years after the kidnapping of the Ayotzinapa students, this report identifies Guerreros Unidos (GU) as the continued leading criminal group in the city, controlling more territory than its rival gang, Cartel de la Sierra. José Ángel Casarrubias Salgado, “El Mochomo,” is called the “maximum leader” of the GU, and Iguala is identified as “a location with important corridors for the trafficking of drugs and weapons.” The report contains recommendations for military, police, intelligence, and civilian authorities on how to reduce criminal activities but makes no mention of local corruption or the well-known complicities between some members of the security forces and the criminals.
Demonstrations, social movements and civil organizations - including the parents of the 43 - are characterized as part of the “agrarian conflict” in Guerrero. Monitoring the Ayotzinapa protests is a central mission for the authorities, though the military is warned to “avoid being present during events except in extreme cases.”
[The National Security Archive has redacted portions of this record that contain personal or private information.]
Document 17
An investigative file compiled by the Special Investigation and Litigation Unit for Ayotzinapa (Unidad Especial de Investigación y Litigación para el Caso Ayotzinapa–UEILCA) in preparation for charging Capt. José Martínez Crespo, former unit leader inside the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala, with ties to organized crime related to narcotrafficking. The confidential document contains the addresses of five separate properties connected to the (then) 48-year-old retired army officer. Three months after this document was created, Martínez Crespo was arrested by federal authorities.
[The National Security Archive has redacted portions of this record that contain personal or private information.]
Document 18
This is the printed speech given by Defense Secretary Luis Crescencio Sandoval at a public event with the parents of the 43 students, government authorities, and the press. In it, Gen. Crescencio Sandoval recounts the many ways in which the military has supported the investigation, including deploying military police to arrest Capt. Martínez Crespo “for his probable responsibility for [participating in] organized crime…”
Document 19
Five days after his public speech, Defense Secretary Crescencio Sandoval writes to President López Obrador personally, painting a sympathetic portrait of Capt. Martínez Crespo - who was then an indicted suspect in the Ayotzinapa case and who had been held in a military prison in Mexico City since his arrest in November 2020. According to interviews conducted with Martínez Crespo - who led a Reaction Force of the 27th Military Infantry Battalion in Iguala the night the students disappeared - the army captain claimed to have no ties to organized crime or narcotrafficking and no connection to the fate of the Ayotzinapa 43. In conveying Martínez Crespo’s account to the President, the Defense Secretary observes that authorities found “no evidence of economic capacity greater than what he has been able to save as a result of his income.” He writes that Martínez Crespo appears “depressed” but is “firm in his determination that his innocence must be recognized.” The letter closes with a reference to the accused military officer’s three-year-old son.
[The National Security Archive has redacted portions of this record that contain personal or private information.]
Document 20
These are aerial images of the 27th Infantry Battalion's military installation (Campo Militar no. 35-C) in Iguala, Guerrero. The military intelligence center CRFI (Centro Regional de Fusión de Inteligencia), which repeatedly denied access to its archives for investigators until President López Obrador’s personal intervention in April 2021, is visible on the far left of the installation.
[1] See, for example, the transcribed interview of first-year student Ernesto Guerrero: "In that same hour and a half, did the army arrive, even though their base is located just meters away from where we were attacked? Not a single soldier came: nor the state police, nor state detectives, nor the army, nor the federal police, nor the marines. How we would have liked to see all those uniforms that are always in the streets intimidating people! But no, not even with a military base just meters away from where the police attacked us and shot at us." In John Gibler, ed., I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They’d Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2017), pp. 81-82.
[2] See, for example, the transcribed interview of first-year student Juan Salgado: “The soldier in charge said that he was going to call the police to come get us because we were committing acts of vandalism.” In John Gibler, ed., I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They’d Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2017), p. 144.