Navy head was commander in Guerrero during the Ayotzinapa case

Rafael Ojeda Durán, current Secretary of the Navy, was commander in charge of the Eighth Naval Region in Acapulco, Guerrero, during the hidden intervention that the unit had in the case of the 43 missing normalistas from Ayotzinapa.

According to curricular data from the Secretary of the Navy, at that time he was mainly in charge of the administration of material goods; technical areas; surveillance functions and management of financial resources, as well as human resources.

On October 27, 2014, when Ojeda was commander in this area, marines were present at the Cocula garbage dump, where they unloaded and handled packages with unknown content and lit a fire near the points where, supposedly, the normalistas were killed and burned, according to the recent report of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), which had access to videos that captured this intervention.

The report reveals that for the first time Semar played a central role in the construction of the so-called “historical truth”, which sought to obstruct and hide what happened to the students. Before these findings, the experts explained, it was only known that the Navy had participated as a perimeter security cordon for the activities of the PGR in the Cocula dump and with the intervention of divers in the San Juan River.

Although the videos obtained by the GIEI were recorded by a Semar drone, with the purpose of recording the proceedings carried out by the sailors. The graphic material is contained in a report classified as “secret” and whose existence was unknown until now.

The experts highlighted that many of the new findings were possible by order of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and although they recognized the current secretary Rafael Ojeda for having delivered the videos, the members of the GIEI warned that there continues to be resistance from some institutions in the delivery of information, especially in terms of intelligence files.