▲ Students’ relatives demonstrated on the 11th anniversary of the tragedy.Photo Germán Canseco
Jim Cason and David Brooks
Correspondents
La Jornada newspaper
Saturday, September 27, 2025, p. 9
Washington and New York., The Drug Control Administration (DEA) intercepted text messages between heroin traffickers in Chicago and Mexico, who worked with leaders and officers “at the highest levels” in Iguala and the state of Guerrero during the disappearance of the 43 normalists of Ayotzinap National in Washington.
“It is impossible to say now what could have happened if that information had reached the hands of the researchers in Mexico immediately after the boys were kidnapped, but there is no doubt that he would have offered critical clues that do not exist in another place,” concluded Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman, researchers of the National Security Archive, independent organization of investigations of official documents, which this Friday spread the texts of these electronic messages, some for the first time.
The intercepted messages are the result of an dea investigation in Chicago on a cell in that cartel city United Warriors (Gu). The agency had judicial authorization to monitor the Blackberry phones of members of the criminal group and intercepted messages between some key leaders and their partners in Mexico.
“We knew of our intelligence and investigations that Iguala was a redoubt of the cartel United Warriors”, Commented the retired Dea agent Mark Giuffre in an interview with Doyle and his colleague Anayansi Diaz- Cortes in 2020.
The DEA discovered by an informant that the cartel had a sophisticated system to move drugs to Chicago and money back to Mexico in the passenger bus buses that travel between that American city and several points of the country, including Iguala.
Some of these electronic messages had already been publicly disseminated, but the National Security Archive indicates that the complete series of the messages had not been disclosed until Friday.
“The text messages make it clear that two members of GU had no prior knowledge of the attacks on the students, but were reacting in real time to the violence that their classmates gang members and the media told them,” says Doyle and Dorfman.
“The chaos created that night in Iguala was a disaster for United Warriors; he undermined his control of the ‘Plaza’ (his drug trafficking territory in and around the city), exacerbated conflicts between them and with other criminal groups, and weakened the protection they normally had received by corrupt civil, police and military authorities.”
Evidence of extensive corruption
The intercepted messages were from the Blackberry of an Adam Casarrubias Salgado (aka Silver, Tomato), who was a leader of Gu in Mexico, and his colleague Pablo Vega Cuevas (aka Transformer) In Chicago. Both men declared themselves guilty in 2025 and were sentenced in US courts. But in September 2014 they were high -level leaders of the cartel and worked quickly to try to limit damage to their organization.
“That they attest to those that the gueyes those Ivan for Acapulco and rose armed (sic),” he wrote Curmudgeon In a text full of errors sent on September 28 as part of the attempt to cover up the activities of United Warriors Around what happened with the normalists two nights before.
Doyle and Dorfman explain that after the arrest of police officers of Iguala, it begins to involve United Warriorsalarming their leaders.
“The texts are evidence of extensive corruption to all levels of the government, including local and state authorities, the Mexican military and the sailors. In the immediate sequel to the attacks in Iguala, the group rushes to protect their collaborators in the government and in the local security forces,” they write Doyle and Dorfman.
The investigators of the National Security Archive point out that a key question is why this information from the DEA was not immediately shared with the researchers in Mexico. “The DEA raised evidence for the persecution of traffickers that included extraordinary information about the Ayotzinapa case, but all of that information did not reach Mexican prosecutors until 2022,” report Doyle and Dorfman.
After the DEA’s office in Chicago issued a press release in December 2014 on the arrest of Vegas Cuevas and another individual, researchers from the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) asked the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto to request copies of this information about the case, which could help the investigation they performed on the disappearance of the 43.
But the Peña Nieto government did not request the DEA Archive for years, according to the investigators of the Archive, and the United States Department of Justice “had little interest in sharing evidence that I wanted to use against heroin traffickers distributing through the west medium.”
They add that “both governments were slow to respond to the insistence of international researchers, who did not have the opportunity to analyze intercepted communications up to eight years after the disappearance of the boys.”
To read intercepted communications and greater file analysis: http://bit.ly/3iiwfvl
