Monday, June 1, 2020

AYOTZINAPA! We do not forgive! We Do not forget! Where is Zerón?


June 1, 2020 12:00 PM

This is the image of the public report of the  International Criminal Police Organization - Interpol indicating that there is NO arrest warrant to locate or aprehend of the former director of the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC), Tomás Zerón de Lucio (El Sembrón). 

These notices are known as Red Notices by Interpol.

Red Notices are issued for fugitives wanted either for prosecution or to serve a sentence. A Red Notice is a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action.



It can be found on the Interpol website here:



According reporting in the national media of Mexico, an arrest warrant for Tomás Zerón was issued on March 10 by a Control judge attached to the Federal Criminal Justice Center in Mexico City, with residence at the Reclusorio Oriente.  Zerón faces an arrest warrant for possible irregularities in the investigation into the Forced Disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa normal school students, victims of Forced Disappearance at hands of police-military-narco agents of the state on September 26, 2014 in Uguala, Guerrero, Mexico.

Furthermore, the same reports indicate that at the request of Mexican federal officials, INTERPOL has issued a Red Notice to locate the former federal official.

There are two reasons that may explain why the arrest warrant for the Interpol RED NOTICE on Tomás Zerón DOES NOT APPEAR in the Interpol public registry:
1) The government of president Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) of Mexico has instructed INTERPOL not to publish the order on its Red Notice list, or

2) There is NO such arrest warrant.

According to the reports, government authorities of the AMLO administration pointed out that Zerón is in Canada, where he allegedly entered in October 2019.

To date, Canadian government officials have refused to admit or deny that Tomás Zerón de Lucio is in the country, while several Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples in the north have proclaimed Tomás Zerón as “Persona Non-Grata” in their territories.

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TONATIERRA
Community Development Institute
PO Box 24009
Phoenix, AZ 85074
May 26, 2020

Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
5100 O'Neill House Office Building
200 C Street SW
Washington, D.C. 20515

Good greetings.

Today marks five years and eight months since the forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students of the normal school Raul Isidro Burgos in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, on the evening of September 26, 2014.  Six deaths, which included three other students, also occurred that evening at the hands of the agents of the Mexican state or their proxies among the local narco cartels.  On the night of their disappearance, the students were on board five commercial buses with final destination in the US cities of Atlanta and Chicago.  Unknown to the students, a shipment of heroin worth an estimated 2 million dollars was hidden on two of the buses.  The students themselves were on route to attend the anniversary of the Massacre of Tlatelolco ‘68, when the Mexican army opened fire killing hundreds of unarmed protesting students in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, where the Olympics of 1968 were being hosted.


The investigation into the case of Forced Disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students remains without resolution, and in the pall of the Covid-19 pandemic, parents of the 43 missing students have been pushed to the margins of the agenda of the new government in Mexico under president Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO).  Today, in spite of the social constraints in place due to the Covid-19 quarantine, the parents of the Ayotzinapa students are manifesting a global call to accountability of the AMLO government, in consequence to commitments he has made to them but not fulfilled.

Today during a global action organized through social networks to commemorate 68 months since students' disappearance, the parents' legal representative, Vidulfo Rosales, called on Mexican federal authorities to inform the relatives of the victims regarding what concrete advances have been made by the AMLO administration in the investigation.  A critical issue of accountability that still has not being reported on publicly after more than five years is the details of the scope of involvement of the Battalion 27 Headquarters of the Mexican Army in Iguala, Guerrero, in the events of September 26, 2014.
 

Instead, the coverup of the criminal involvement of agents of the state, from the army to the judiciary, continues in the AMLO administration. The campaign to falsify witnesses, evidence, and subvert a legitimate investigation is prolonged even though on March 18, 2020, a Mexican judge issued an arrest warrant for the former head of investigations for the national Attorney General's Office, Tomás Zerón, for alleged violations in the original federal investigation of the case of the 43 Ayotzinapa students.

Tomás Zerón and five other former officials face charges including torture, forced disappearance, and judicial misconduct. Three have been arrested and three, including Zerón, are still at large. Zerón oversaw the criminal investigation agency of the Attorney General's Office and also its forensic work in the Ayotzinapa case. The students' bodies have never been found, in spite of the fact that a GPS signal from one of the student’s cell phones was tracked to the Battalion 27 headquarters in Iguala in the early morning hours of September 27th.

Zerón's team said in October 2014 that they had found a bone fragment of one of the students in the river by the dump at the town of Cocula. However, a team of independent experts determined the Zerón account was fabricated and discovered that Zerón had visited the location a day earlier with an alleged gang member, without notifying the man's lawyer or filing a report on his visit.  Many of the suspects arrested in the case were later released, and many claimed they had been tortured by police or the military.

Federal officials who were not authorized to be quoted by name have stated that a warrant has been issued for Zerón's arrest and that Interpol had been notified to help locate him in case he was outside of Mexico. One of the officials said there were indications that Zerón may have left for Canada in late 2019.

Yet Zerón is not under arrest today. Today, speaking for the parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, attorney Vidulfo Rosales called for the Mexican government to explain why arrest warrants have not been executed against the government officials allegedly involved in fabricating the so-called government’s "historical truth" of the Cocula dump story and promoting the criminal coverup from the highest levels of government.

Explanations are called for, certainly by the Mexican government, but if Tomás Zerón is in Canada, there must also be an accounting for the complicity of Canadian authorities in sheltering such an accused criminal and now participating in the international coverup of the Forced Disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students.  
 


Explanations are also to be had by the US government, far beyond the particulars of the Ayotzinapa case. The military apparatus of the Mexican state would not have the capacity to engage in the surveillance, assault, and forced disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students if the US government wasn’t providing funding, logistical support, and political cover under the Plan Merida Initiative - Mexico.  Masked as an international “War on Drugs”, the Plan Merida-Mexico serves as the tool of the narco-state of Mexico not to eliminate the drug cartels in Mexico, but instead to establish hegemony, control systems, and the backing of corrupt government officials in order to manage the market of supply and transportation routes to feed the demand for drugs north of the US-Mexico border.

An estimated 120,000 deaths in Mexico attributed to the violence of the “War on Drugs” have been reported since the Plan Merida Initiative began under President Calderon in 2009.
 


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