Mexican Mayor Arrested Along with Purported Guerreros Unidos Cartel Leader

MEXICO CITY – Mexican federal forces have arrested an alleged leader of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel and the mayor of Cocula, a town in the southern state of Guerrero whose waste dump was allegedly used to incinerate the bodies of 43 trainee teachers last year, officials told EFE on Friday.

The police and military operation was carried out Thursday night, a government official said without indicating where. Local media said the arrests were made in Cuernavaca, capital of the central Mexican state of Morelos.

In addition to Adan Zenen Casarrubias, the suspected drug-gang leader, and Mayor Erick Ulises Ramirez, a member of the leftist opposition PRD party who took office on Sept. 30, authorities also detained Eloy Flores Cantu, who identified himself as a legal advisor to the PRD in the lower house of Congress, the official said.

The detainees had two firearms and a packet with white powder “with the characteristics of cocaine” in their possession, the official said.

Zenen Casarrubias is the brother of purported Guerreros Unidos leader Sidronio Casarrubias, who was arrested a year ago for his alleged role in the disappearances of the 43 students in September 2014.

The capture of Sidronio Casarrubias led authorities to discover the extent to which organized crime had infiltrated the city of Iguala’s municipal government, which received more than $150,000 a month from the cartel.

It also exposed the cartel’s control over the municipal police forces of Iguala and the neighboring town of Cocula.

Police attacked the trainee teachers from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a teachers training institution in Guerrero, on Sept. 26, 2014, after they had commandeered (the students’ peers say “borrowed”) buses in the nearby city of Iguala that they planned to use to travel to Mexico City for a protest.

Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students were abducted that night.

Federal authorities say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of Iguala’s corrupt mayor.

The cops handed over the students to cartel gunmen, who killed the young people and burned their bodies to ashes at a garbage dump in Cocula, according to the official story.

But the parents of the missing students and their supporters reject that account, and last month a group of independent experts commissioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a report that cited a series of irregularities in the investigation.

Among other things, the experts said in their report – released on Sept. 6 and based on six months of field work, interviews and a review of the government’s evidence and conclusions – that “no evidence exists to support the theory” that 43 bodies were incinerated at the dump on Sept. 27, 2014, the day after the students disappeared.

Indeed, the report said the evidence gathered at the site showed there was not enough fire to burn even one body, the report said.

The experts also corroborated news reports indicating that federal police had been monitoring the students since they left Ayotzinapa for Iguala and at the very least knew that they had come under armed attack yet did not intervene.