A Mexican drug trafficker considered a prime suspect in the disappearance of 43 students in the south of the country in 2014 has been re-arrested after being released in 2019, authorities said Friday.
“Gildardo Lopez Astudillo has been placed in custody” for “organized crime,” a federal security source close to the case told the press, speaking anonymously.
The drug trafficker was transferred to the high-security prison of Altiplano, located in the State of Mexico, neighboring the capital.
He was first captured in 2015 as part of the investigation into the students’ disappearance, then released in 2019 after a judge ruled that the evidence against him had been obtained illegally.
Lopez Astudillo, nicknamed El Gil, is accused of being the leader of the “Guerreros Unidos” cartel, which operates in the state of Guerrero, in southern Mexico.
It was in this state that 43 young people disappeared on the night of September 26-27, 2014, after going to the city of Iguala to hijack buses to go to the capital to take part in a demonstration.
According to investigations carried out during the time of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), corrupt police officers allegedly handed the students over to the “Guerreros Unidos” cartel, which mistook them for a rival gang and killed them before cremating their bodies.
These investigations have been rejected by the government of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and by experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The release of Lopez Astudillo and other suspects had been strongly condemned by the relatives of the missing students and by the head of state, who accuses judges of protecting criminals – one of the reasons why he is trying to promote a controversial reform of the judicial system, currently under discussion in Congress.
The arrest of the drug trafficker comes ahead of a series of demonstrations in memory of the Ayotzinapa students to mark ten years since their disappearance.
sem/arm/pz
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