FIU reserve for five years financial information of those involved in the Iguala case

Dora Villanueva

Newspaper La Jornada
Friday, October 21, 2022, p. eleven

The Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) reserved for five years the information that it delivered to the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case (Covaj), part of which shows the financing flows between authorities of all levels and operators. of organized crime who were involved in the disappearance of 43 members of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School.

Supported by arguments about the tasks of the FIU, the unit belonging to the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit assures that disclosing part of what was delivered to the commission of the Ministry of the Interior would imply jeopardize prevention activities performing.

Part of the 512 sheets delivered by the FIU, then headed by Santiago Nieto, to the Covaj, would be exhibiting that despite the imprisonment of José Luis Abarca and María de los Ángeles Pineda and the blocking of their daughters’ bank accounts, the financial activity of the Abarca Pineda family did not diminish after the investigations began into what happened on September 26 and 27, 2014, as it was learned the day from sources familiar with the file.

Instead, the family of the former municipal president of Iguala continued to receive lots of cashaccording to an analysis of the documents that arrived at the Ministry of the Interior in July 2020, sent by the FIU.

The FIU has been directed since November 2021 by Pablo Gómez.

Beyond the flows of resources around the Abarca family, owner of commercial spaces such as Galerías Tamarindos, in the center of Iguala, the FIU reviewed the financial activity of some members of organized crime gangs who allegedly participated in the disappearance of the normalists. There were no major findings at this point, since the unit only receives and processes information from the financial system, while most of the operations that finance crimes are carried out in cash.

According to the analysis of the 512 sheets that the Covaj received from the FIU, no financial follow-up on the military stands out, which – according to the investigations supervised by Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas – would have participated in the disappearance.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has declared himself in favor of disclosing all the information related to the Ayotzinapa case.

All the information received and generated by this unit constitutes a mechanism that, in accordance with the applicable regulations, is considered intelligence and support for the development of intelligence and counterintelligence activities.Gómez responded to a request for transparency, defending the confidentiality of information for five years.

By providing the requested information, the intelligence activities carried out by this FIU would be hindered, since the minimum action of specifying or indicating the data or information that is available in our files would imply revealing the specific data that this unit analyzes and uses. for the generation of intelligence for national securityhe added.

The temporary restriction on access to information imposed by the head of the FIU, Pablo Gómez, on the documents that make up the Ayotzinapa case report, expires on October 10, 2027.