Arizona Court affirms responsibility of Enrique Peña Nieto, ex-president of Mexico in the case of the 43 Ayotzinapa Students

Justice for Ayotzinapa 

Arizona Court affirms responsibility of Enrique Peña Nieto, ex-president of Mexico in the case of the 43 Ayotzinapa Students

Anabel Hernández: Contracoriente!

 

 

February 26, 2020

In a historic decision, an Immigration Court judge in a political asylum trial in Arizona has refuted the official Mexican government’s version of the Ayotzinapa case as a state fabricated false cover up.
 

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For four years I witnessed a historical judicial process in an immigration court in Florence, Arizona. The verdict in the case was issued on January 7, 2020 and provided an unexpected turn to the case of the 43 students of the Ayotzinapa rural normal school Raúl Isidro Burgos, missing since September 26, 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero. The forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is an unsolved crime that marked the government of former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

What not even the current Mexican government has dared to say, Judge Molly S. Frazer has now stated clearly and forcefully: Only institutions of the Mexican federal government had the power and political influence to bring about the forced disappearance of  the 43 Normal School students and then attempt to fabricate a false official version of the events in order to cover up the truth.
 

It all happened in the context of a political asylum trial requested by a Mexican national named Ulises Bernabé García, who on the night of the disappearance of the 43 young students was a barrister serving as a temporary judge in a low level court whose duty was determine fines for people who drank on public roads or drove in a drunken state, or created scandals on the public roads. From being a simple justice of the peace, as these public servants are also known, Bernabé García became a key witness to the events that occurred and also those that did not occur on the night of September 26-27, 2014.

Traditionally, immigration courts in the United States are conservative, even more so in a state like Arizona where there are ultra-right groups that hunt in the desert for migrants who have crossed the border illegally from Mexico to the USA. The trials of Mexicans requesting political asylum in that country are very difficult to advance and to be granted the protection of the American government is almost impossible.

At the end of 2015, American lawyer Margo Cowan, legal representative of Bernabé García, recognized for her fight for the defense of migrants' human rights, asked me to declare before the Court as an “expert witness”, a judicial category in the US legal system. I had investigated the case of the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students and had already found documentary evidence and clear testimonies that showed that the official version of the Attorney General's Office of the Peña Nieto government about the events in Iguala was false. My findings were made in accord with my professional methodology of research that has allowed me to discover and document, corroborating facts and truths before the much slower and often flawed Mexican judicial system.
 

Cowan knew that one of my main witnesses was Bernabé Garcia. I met him in November 2014 when I traveled to Iguala for the first time to do a field investigation of the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa normal school students, which was funded by the UC Berkeley Investigative Journalism Program. My father had been kidnapped and disappeared in 2000. I also went through an ordeal, not knowing where he was, if he was suffering, if he was hungry or cold.

I could imagine what the parents of 43 felt for not knowing anything about their children after more than 30 days. I can imagine their pain after six years of not knowing the whereabouts of their children.

On that trip the first clear, crisp, spontaneous and nonjudgmental voice I heard was that of Bernabé García. When everything was murky, when the Mexican government imposed on the national and international media its "official version" of the events, when it claimed that the attack had been orchestrated by the municipal president José Luis Abarca and his local police force, without the knowledge of the 27th Battalion of Infantry of the Mexican Army, of the base authorities of the Federal Police, of the base authorities of the National Attorney General, or the state police being aware of the operation, when at the time all of these government agencies were located within the perimeter of the locations where the attack on the boys occurred, where three died and 43 have since disappeared.
 

The conversation with Bernabé García, typical of the manner when I do this kind of research, started casually. He was free, he had no legal problems, and the position he had as a justice of the peace was coincidental since he was only a substitute for the actual magistrate who had requested permission for a three-month temporary leave of absence. I asked him to describe the events of that day of September 26, 2014.

His memory was still very fresh. He even told me what time he got up, at what time he showed up to work that morning at the headquarters of the municipal police in Iguala. He told me at what time he ate lunch, at what time did he return, and how many people had been arrested during that day and taken to the headquarters of the municipal police. He said six. He showed me right there the fines that he had ordered and how those men arrested who did not have money to pay the fine were taken into custody to the prison cells of the police headquarters.

According to the official version events related by the National Attorney General (PGR), that night while the justice of the peace ruled on fines for people were drunk in public or urinated on public roads, the 43 Ayotzinapa students had been taken to the headquarters of the municipal police and from there they would have been taken in vans of the same police to a place where they would have then been supposedly handed over to a known criminal group that then killed them and burned the bodies. All done supposedly under orders given by the municipal president of Iguala, José Luis Abarca.

I asked Barnabas Garcia about the students, he looked at me and clearly told me:

“They were never there, go ask the army. The proof that they were not there is that the Army arrived at the same time they say the students were there.”

According to the PGR the army arrived between 11:30 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. At that time the fiercest attacks on the 43 students occurred in the streets of downtown Iguala. The normalistas were shot and chased through the streets. Two of them were injured were lying wounded on the asphalt in the rain.

Barnabas Garcia was the first witness to say that the Army was actually on the streets of Iguala at the time of the attacks. It was a lie that they had no knowledge of the facts as the government said.

“Why lie if there was nothing to hide?” I thought.
 

That was the origin of my research on the presence and participation of the Army.  Justice of the peace Barnabas Garcia was telling the truth, a year later the Captain of the 27th Battalion himself, after lying several times in his first ministerial statements, recognized the veracity of Bernabé García versions of the events in Iguala.

After that clue I found many elements, including expert evidence that proved that the Army and the Federal Police led the attack that night and the resulting disappearance of the students. The entity that coordinated all the forces of law enforcement was the Army. 

The mayor and the municipal police were small figures in comparison to the strength of the Army and other federal government corporations that were watching and following the students for four hours before the attacks, during the attacks and in a direct consequence that led the disappearance of the 43. 

Thanks to Bernabé García I followed the evidence to discover that the Army controlled the security cameras of the entire city, and it was the only the Army that had the access to be able to erase the videos of these cameras to eliminate any evidence that may implicate them.

I published this first part of my research in December 2014, in an article titled "The True Night of Iguala", which later became a book published in 2016. 

As a result, this reporting which coincided with the most fragile point of the political discourse of the Peña Nieto government, days later the then attorney general went public and proclaimed his version of the official "historical truth" based on statements obtained under torture, and with zero expert evidence that could confirm any trace of the truth of these government statements. He began a fierce campaign of persecution against Barnabas Garcia who in order save his life then entered the United States illegally and requested political asylum because his life was in serious danger.

For 4 years I testified in the Arizona Immigration Court before Judge Molly S Frazer. I narrated my journalistic investigation step by step, provide documents and evidence without embellishment. During each court session, Judge Frazer asked for information regarding even the smallest of detail. It was evident that she was seriously studying the details of the case. She had in her evidence file 61 elements submitted by both Attorney Cowan and the Department of Homeland Security who was opposed to the granting of asylum to Barnabas Garcia.

As a general rule the US immigration courts are opposed to giving political asylum no matter the profile of the person, and secondly because, due to the statements given me by the PGR in Mexico, an arrest warrant had been issued against Barnabas Garcia in order to silence him. And then the army began to persecute him.

Because of the depth of information which the scope of the trial revealed, and I know this first hand because I was there, Judge Frazer was not only judging whether or not to grant asylum to Barnabas Garcia, she determined that she really needed to know the truth of what happened that terrible night in Iguala.
 

The Judge could have only delivered a ruling on Bernabé García’s petition for asylum, but on January 7, 2020, she went a step further: She not only decided to grant political asylum to the substitute Justice of the Peace Bernabé García, but she also issued a historical ruling that sets the antecedent within an American court regarding a serious violation of human rights in Mexico.

"The Court agrees with the conclusion of the expert witness, Mrs. Hernández, that the official historical truth, created by the Mexican government has been refuted, that numerous witnesses were tortured by the Mexican government and that pieces of evidence were also manufactured or sown at the scene of the crime by the Mexican government in order to support the false historical truth,” affirms the ruling of the Arizona Court.

"(The Court) Challenges the belief that a municipal police department would have the political influence and the resources to plan such an intricate cover-up and disappearance of the 43 Mexican students. It is much more possible that the federal government of Mexico and the federal police have been responsible for this horrible incident,” states the judgment of the court.

In this way, Judge Frazer not only extended protection to Bernabé García, but provided in so many ways a form of justice to the 43 missing students, to their families, and for Mexican society as a whole.

It is a justice and truth that still until today the government of the leftist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador cannot or does not dare to uphold. 

There are people in his cabinet who think the Ayotzinapa case will remain unresolved because the president does not want to have an internal fight within his administration with those implicated in the Mexican Army.

I still hope that is not true.

Anabel Hernandez, Mexican Investigative Reporter and Author

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