DEA WIRETAPS SHOW MEXICAN MILITARY-DRUG CARTEL COLLUSION IN THE CASE OF 43 STUDENTS KIDNAPPED IN 2014

(The Mexican police, military officers and others secretly colluded with a cartel that kidnapped 43 students, a case unsolved after nearly a decade. Wiretaps show just how much the authorities helped the cartel behind the mass abduction, and what led to it.)

By Natalie Kitroeff and  Ronen Bergman
The New York Times

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A vast trove of about 23,000 unpublished text messages, witness testimony and investigative files obtained by The New York Times point to an answer: Just about every arm of government in that part of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.

One of the emergency responders who rushed to the scene of the mass abduction that night had an unofficial second job – gathering intelligence for the cartel. For months, the wiretaps capture him sending minute-by-minute updates on law enforcement’s every move to a Guerreros Unidos leader he called “boss.”

A coroner also did the cartel’s bidding, sending photos of corpses and evidence at crime scenes, the messages show.

After killing some of the students, the traffickers incinerated the bodies in a crematory owned by the coroner’s family, investigators say. In unpublished testimony, one cartel member told the authorities that the ovens were routinely used “to make people disappear without a trace.”

he text messages may also help answer another open question in the case: Why did Guerreros Unidos execute a group of 43 students who were training to be teachers and had nothing to do with organized crime?

In the months and weeks before the abduction, the wiretaps show, the cartel had grown increasingly paranoid, beset by deadly infighting and scrambling to defend its territory as rivals pushed in.

So, when dozens of young men swept into the city of Iguala on passenger buses — not unlike the ones the cartel used to smuggle drugs into the United States — the traffickers mistook their convoy for an intrusion by enemies and gave the order to attack, prosecutors now say.

Nine years after the students vanished, no one has been convicted of the crime, turning the case into a symbol of a broken system that cannot solve even the most brazen acts of brutality. The previous government was accused of orchestrating a sweeping cover-up to hide the involvement of federal forces in the abduction, especially the all-powerful military.

Now the investigation is at a critical juncture. Under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the authorities have ordered the arrest of 20 Mexican soldiers in connection with the kidnappings, including more than a dozen in June. The unpublished wiretaps have been crucial to building the case.

The cartel’s conversations were intercepted by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2014 while investigating the cartel for trafficking drugs into suburban Chicago. Mexico sought the text messages for years, but American officials handed over the 23,000 only last year, in part because of a lingering distrust of the Mexican government, an investigator said. The D.E.A. declined to comment.

The messages obtained by The Times do not cover the night of the disappearance, and key details of what happened to the students are still unknown.

What’s clear is that the horror started on Sept. 26, 2014, when dozens of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College traveled to Iguala, in the state of Guerrero. They commandeered several buses to go to a march in Mexico City, a tradition the authorities had tolerated in the past.

This time, they never made it past the city limits.

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