www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/world/americas/mexico-iguala-students-kidnapping.html
Excerpts
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.”
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.”
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 The unpublished wiretaps have been crucial to building the case.
Pegasus
And days after the attack, the army knew the location of two suspects talking about releasing students who, investigators say, may have still been alive.
How the military knew this is now clearer — it was using a powerful spy tool manufactured in Israel, known as Pegasus, to surveil the gang’s members, an investigator told The Times.
