The Federal Ministerial Police of the Mexican Attorney General’s Office has arrested the person responsible for Public Security Secretary of the Mexican state of Guerrero when the 43 Ayotzinapa ‘normalistas’ disappeared, Leonardo Octavio Vazquez Perez, has been arrested in the state of Nayarit.
Federal sources quoted by the Mexican newspaper ‘La Jornada’ have indicated that the retired lieutenant Vázquez Pérez has been placed at the disposal of the third district court in criminal matters based in Toluca, state of Mexico, and admitted to the Center for Social Readaptation number 1, Altiplano, located in the municipality of Almoloya de Juárez.
Likewise, federal authorities have arrested Rodolfo Nava Ortiz, former municipal police officer of Huitzuco, also implicated in the disappearances of the students in 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero.
According to the latest investigations, the ex-agent participated in the aggression against the members of the Los Avispones team, which resulted in the death of the soccer player David Josué García Evangelista; the passenger of a cab, identified as Blanca Montiel Sánchez, and the driver of the bus in which the players were traveling.
Both had arrest warrants requested by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and were charged with organized crime for alleged links to the armed group Guerreros Unidos.
Leonardo Octavio Vázquez Pérez allegedly received $50,000 a month in exchange for providing protection to the group and the money was given to him by Felipe Flores, head of the Iguala municipal police.
Rodolfo Nava Ortiz, for his part, allegedly supported, along with others of his colleagues and Alejandro ‘El Cholo’ Palacios, one of the heads of the Guerreros Unidos hitmen and hawks, in the attacks against the normalistas and members of the Los Avispones soccer team on the night of September 26 and early morning of September 27, 2014.
Eight years after the disappearance of the students of the Normal Rural Isidro Burgos, in Ayotzinapa, the relatives and companions of the disappeared have once again taken to the streets to protest and demand justice.
Most have insisted that the then president, Enrique Peña Nieto, lied and have urged the current government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador to «say what really happened to the normalistas».
The 43 students from the Normal School of Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, disappeared in the early hours of September 27, 2014 in the neighboring municipality of Iguala during a protest against local authorities.
The first official version was that they were caught by the criminal organization Los Rojos, as part of a settling of scores between rival groups, and that hitmen killed and incinerated them and disposed of their remains in the Cocula landfill, facts later refuted by a new investigation.
In September 2020, a last investigation by the Attorney General’s Office contemplated the negligence and irregularities committed by the authorities of the former government of former President Peña Nieto. This new investigation points to the fact that the youths were chased and killed by municipal police.
