MEXICO CITY (CN) — In his morning press conference, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador denounced a federal judge's weekend decision to release eight soldiers implicated in the 2003 mass disappearance of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero, as politically motivated.
Judge Raquel Ivette Duarte Cedillo imposed a new set of precautionary measures on Saturday, allowing the soldiers to await their trial on forced disappearance charges outside of prison. The soldiers must pay 50,000 pesos bail, surrender their passports and report to the Precautionary Measures Unit of the Judiciary on the first and 16th of every month.
The released soldiers are Gustavo Rodríguez de la Cruz, Omar Torres Marquillo, Juan Andrés Flores, Ramiro Manzanares Sanabria, Roberto de los Santos Eduviges, Eloy Estrada Díaz, Uri Yashiel Reyes and Juan Sotelo.
López Obrador called the judge's order a typical Saturday decision in order to avoid normal working day procedures, "as if it were merely a legal matter, not a matter of justice."
He added the judiciary has the "deliberate intention of favoring the hypothesis that the Mexican government protects the army," and ordered the soldiers' release to make him look bad and discredit Mexico's army. López Obrador has given more power to the army than any other president in modern Mexican history.
López Obrador said the federal government sent a letter to the Supreme Court Chief Justice Norma Lucía Piña Hernández on Dec. 22, warning her of the judiciary's plans to discredit him. This letter was made public Tuesday by Interior Secretary Luisa María Alcalde.
The National Association of Circuit Magistrates and District Judges of the Federal Judiciary defended the federal judge's decision today, stating that the prosecutor general's office had the chance to justify pretrial detention and that their release does not mean the soldiers are exonerated.
Currently, the parents of the 43 missing students are in a fight for the release of 800 documents from the Regional Intelligence Fusion Center of the Mexican Secretary of National Defense, an intelligence agency active in Guerrero at the time, which are believed to contain further evidence in the Ayotzinapa case.
The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), an independent group created by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate the case, concluded the army was the major obstacle to uncovering the truth.
"According to the GIEI’s statements to journalists concerning their findings, the investigation into the Ayotzinapa case was actually two separate inquiries: one managed by the attorney general’s office, which was the public face of the government’s efforts to solve the crime; the other, a clandestine 'war room' made up of the principal federal security agencies," the group found.
"The 'war room' included officers from the offices of the attorney general's criminal investigation agency, navy, Defense Secretariat, National Intelligence Center, federal police, Guerrero public security forces, and military installations in Guerrero, (including the 27th Infantry Battalion in Iguala and the 35th Military Zone in Chilpancingo). Information and analysis generated by the clandestine group was never shared outside the war room, even with the attorney general's office."
López Obrador has defended the Mexican military countless times during investigations into what happened to the Ayotzinapa students.
General Salvador Cienfuegos, who refused to allow the GIEI access to interview soldiers in the Ayotzinapa case, was arrested in October 2020 by U.S. officials as part of a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation and later returned to Mexico after López Obrador threatened that he would restrict DEA access in Mexico.
After his return, the Prosecutor General's Office said it would bring no charges against Cienfuegos, a decision firmly supported by López Obrador.
López Obrador has also given the military full control of Mexico City's main airport, major construction projects, including the new tourist railway Maya Train, total control of customs and, in his first year in office, he created the national guard and then handed control of the national guard to the Army.
Mexico's defense budget is set for an 81% increase this year, the majority of which will go to the Defense Ministry and navy.
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