Alonso Urrutia
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, July 26, 2024, p. 4
The annexes of the President’s first report on the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa that Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself sent to the parents of the victims conclude: There is no evidence that military personnel participated in the arrest and subsequent disappearance of the 43 students.
. Following instructions from the Chief Executive, the document and its annexes were published on the official website of the Government of Mexico.
As part of the conclusions, it is stressed that until now it has not been possible to establish the time, place and circumstances in which “the military personnel were on the day of the events, mainly the reaction force Martinez
(which was made up of personnel from the 27th Infantry Battalion), which went out to patrol the city of Iguala without ever having any interaction with the missing students.”
In the document, released two months after the tenth anniversary of the events, Sedena mentions the various collaborative actions it has had for the investigations, among which it highlights that between April and October 2021 it delivered 9,617 pages that were of interest to the members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts and the Commission for the Truth of the Ayotzinapa Case.
In 2019, another 9,218 pages had already been shared, he added, bringing the total number of pages sent to 18,845 that also reached the Attorney General’s Office.
At the same time, Sedena reports that between January 2019 and June 2024, it has provided support in 155 search plans in different locations to both investigative bodies with the participation of 3,184 soldiers, 384 vehicles and 9 units of heavy machinery. 1,416 elements of the National Guard were involved.
In sum, This office has collaborated with the authorities in charge of investigating the events, opening and sending the records it has, in order to verify that military personnel did not intervene in the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa normal school students.
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As part of its argument, Sedena includes a report on soldier Julio César López Patolzin, who, being part of the Army, requested authorization to join the Ayotzinapa Normal School. The agency explains that as a soldier he was trained at the Petatlán Regional Training Center and “did not have any military intelligence courses.”
He made his request to the Army to be allowed to become a normal school student on May 15, 2014 (as other soldiers do to study in civilian schools, according to Sedena). It was not until August 20, 2014, when López Patolzin entered as a first-year student at the normal school, a little more than a month before the disappearance of the 43 normal school students.
Sedena reports that he would study for a degree in primary school “without generating any report in the short time he spent at the aforementioned school, about his activities there, as well as during the night of September 26 and 27, 2014. It was not until October 5 of that year when the soldier’s parents filed a complaint with the Guerrero Attorney General’s Office for his disappearance.
It was not until September 10, 2018, when it was determined that he was discharged from the Army due to his disappearance after “having remained in that situation for more than three months.”
