Why Did a Drug Gang Kill 43 Students? Text Messages Hold Clues Natalie Kitroeff and Ronen Bergman - The New York Times
go to original September 3, 2023

Photos of missing students are seen during a march in support of the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College missing students in Mexico City. (Reuters)

It is perhaps Mexico’s most notorious cold case — 43 college students shot at by the police, forced into patrol cars, handed over to a drug cartel and never seen again.

The mystery has haunted the nation for nearly a decade. How could a relatively unknown gang pull off one of the worst atrocities in Mexico’s recent history, with the help of the police and the military watching the mass abduction unfold in real time?

A vast trove of about 23,000 unpublished text messages, witness testimony and investigative files obtained by The New York Times point to an answer: Just about every arm of government in that part of southern Mexico had been secretly working for the criminal group for months, putting the machinery of the state in the cartel’s hands and flattening any obstacle that got in its way.

The police commanders whose officers snatched many of the students that night in 2014 had been taking direct orders from the drug traffickers, the text messages show. One of the commanders gave guns to cartel members, while another hunted down their rivals on command.

The military, which closely monitored the abduction but never came to the students’ aid, had been showered with cartel bribes, too. In the text messages, which were caught on wiretaps, traffickers and their collaborators griped about the soldiers’ endless greed, calling them “whores” whom they had “in the bag.”

One lieutenant even armed gunmen connected to the cartel and, a witness said, helped the police try to cover up their role in the crime after the students were kidnapped and killed.

It has long been known that police officers and an assortment of government officials either helped the cartel abduct the students, or watched the crime happen and did nothing to stop it.

But the text messages have been a breakthrough for investigators — offering the clearest picture yet of a possible motive for the collusion between the authorities and the killers.

Fewer than two dozen of the exchanges have ever been made public. What the thousands of others reveal is staggering: Far beyond buying individual favors, the cartel, known as Guerreros Unidos, had effectively turned public officials into full-blown employees.

The government’s subservience is what made the mass killing of 43 college students possible, investigators say. And the loyalty ran deep.

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: Mexico Began Prosecuting 116 People in the Ayotzinapa Case (Prensa Latina)

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!