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After the Ayotzinapa tragedy occurred just over a year ago on the night of Sept. 26 and through the early hours of the following morning, people in Mexico and around the world were puzzled as to why it happened. This question lingers on even today, but the answer could very well lie in a much greater issue related to the widespread and profound collusion of government officials and organized crime.
The facts that buses and trucks are widely used in Mexico to transport drugs to the border and that police are corrupt are not secrets, and after further scrutiny of the information regarding the Ayotzinapa case, many doubts become clearer – the close proximity between drug traffickers, government officials and politicians at all levels.
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But it is an issue very few even dare to mention. However the extent of complicity is something the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto so desperately seems to want to cover up their negligence, lack of interest or will to investigate, and the fact that they fabricated testimonies through scapegoats they carefully selected and coerced to sign statements that strengthen the official version.
Just one example of the apparent high level of complicity between organized crime and government is the case of a huge multimillion-dollar dairy company called Lecheria Santa Monica, owned by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who is the closest ally of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, which continues to operate. The U.S. Treasury Department has been accusing Zambada of using the dairy company to launder money and has informed the Mexican authorities of the milk company and who the owner is.
RELATED: The Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexican Culture
Mexico has had a serious crisis of human rights since at least 1968, when then President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz instructed his Minister of the Interior Luis Echeverria to violently repress the student movement of Tlatelolco. Close to 500 people were killed by security forces, and dozens more forcibly disappeared.
The objective was to send a message to all social groups and activists to tone it down. The United States was ultimately behind the whole ordeal because Washington was very concerned with a growing leftist movement in their southern neighbor’s territory as well as the possible disruption of the 1968 Mexico Olympic games, according to declassified CIA documents.
In 1997, the New York Times revealed U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) information that linked powerful Mexican politician Manlio Fabio Beltrones, to drug trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes, also known as the “Lord of the Skies.” Many believe he did more than just receive tens of millions of dollars from the deceased leader of the Juarez Cartel.
The article republished in Spanish by La Jornada Feb. 23, 1997, said that Raul Salinas de Gortari and his brother, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) were also receiving hundreds of millions from Carrillo. In 2007, Raul had at least one bank account with about US$150 million seized by Swiss authorities.
Beltrones is an influential politician and lawmaker who was president of Mexico’s Senate until 2007 as well as governor of the northern state of Sonora. He is being considered as the most likely presidential candidate for the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in three years.
In 1998, then Swiss prosecutor Carla del Ponte delivered a report linking Carlos Salinas de Gortari – along with many other powerful Mexican politicians – to cartels, saying he too received huge amounts of money from organized crime.
In 2009, La Jornada published a photo of Peña Nieto hugging lawyer and close collaborator of El Chapo, Humberto Celaya, who had also posted various photos of him and the Mexican president on different occasions and events.
RELATED: Opinion: Peña Nieto Sanctioned El Chapo’s Escape
On May 10, 2014, Mexican news website sinembargo said that Colombia's Attorney General's office had accused Juan Jose Rendon, a Venezuelan who was a campaign adviser for Peña Nieto in 2012, of being closely linked to international drug traffickers. The news site alleged he was paid tens of millions for no known reason other than his influence with both Peña Nieto and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who he also advised.
In February 2014, ex-DEA boss in El Paso, Texas, Phil Jordan, told Univision that the U.S. government had intelligence that El Chapo had financed Peña Nieto's presidential campaign. Given the information, Jordan expressed his surprise when the drug lord was arrested.
“I thought that with the PRI in power, Chapo Guzman would never be arrested because he poured in a lot of money into Peña Nieto's campaign,” he said. Jordan did not mention that it was during the government of opposition President Vicente Fox, the drug lord escaped for the first time and grew more powerful through Fox and his successor, Felipe Calderon, who was from the same National Action Party (PAN).
This past July, El Universal reported on a U.S. Treasury Department document that linked 14 of El Chapo's businesses directly to the government of Peña Nieto. So while the Treasury Department continues to ask the Mexican federal government why the more than 1,000 companies linked to Sinaloa cartel have not been shut down and instead continue to operate normally, one can only speculate that it's because officials and politicians protect them, likely in exchange for huge sums of money.
With all this in mind, we go back to the Ayotzinapa case and the fact that in Dec. 2014, Federal Prosecutor in Illinois, Nicol Kim, revealed a DEA report indicating that the Guerreros Unidos or United Warriors of the state of Guerrero were smuggling cocaine and heroin into the United States for distribution in Chicago. This is the group that the Mexican government says killed the 43 Ayotzinapa students and burned their remains to ashes, a version highly refuted by international experts.
The report also stated the drugs were being shipped in buses registered to companies in Guerrero, precisely where the Ayotzinapa students were using to move around before they were attacked by local police.
Close cooperation between security forces, government officials and drug traffickers surfaces clearly as municipal police and other heavily armed masked men attacked the five buses. One of them was transporting a children's soccer team called Los Avispones, where the driver and a 15-year-old boy were killed as more than 200 high-powered shots were fired at their bus. A woman near the attack also died. Police and other masked men had orders to prevent the buses from leaving Iguala, although Los Avispones were already at a distance.
"The business of drugs that moves from Iguala toward the U.S. could explain the extremely violent nature and massive character of the attack ... the duration and the later attack on the bus carrying Los Avispones,” the team of international investigators of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (IACHR) said early September.
The federal government needs to explain why they so strongly rejected the group's report and why they have neglected to investigate the bus companies in question.
Authorities must also explain why they are so eager to tamper with the investigation and manipulate the testimonies of the people arrested in connection with the Ayotzinapa case.
However similar incidents have occurred elsewhere in Mexico, in which groups of people are abducted and later appear tortured and dead.
Mexican architect Martin Mejia told teleSUR that in 2012 a group of construction workers employed by him were abducted and that he later received threatening phone calls from a male saying he was going to find out who they worked for and then kill them all.
“I asked a friend to help me and he called the police in Tepic, Nayarit (600 miles north of Mexico City) to tell them that the people abducted were simply construction workers and not drug traffickers and that if they were killed it would be a grave mistake,” he said.
Shortly after the call, the construction workers were released. Two of them were badly injured. They told their boss they had been confused for drug traffickers and that police had also participated in their detention and torture.
These numerous incidents demonstrate a situation of government complicity with organized crime, and explain why so many abductions and homicides take place in broad daylight, sometimes perpetrated by convoys of heavily armed men. It also sheds light into why so many crimes are never solved or even looked into.
The Ayotzinapa case is definitely about human rights and enforced disappearances, but it also exposes the bigger picture of how tightly knit the relations between Mexican officials, politicians and organized crime are. Some may say government organizes crime or at least regulates it.
This is why impunity in Mexico is at least 98 percent, as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said this Wednesday.
He also said authorities neglect to carry out investigations and to resolve cases. The question is why? Most people in Mexico know exactly why and those who read this article may have a clearer picture.
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