Cuini and Ayotzinapa's Narco Witnesses
Under AMLO, investigators gave dubious benefits to cartel bosses, including the financial brain of the Jalisco Cartel, further twisting the case of disappeared students
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In May 2021, soldiers and federal agents went to Mexico’s top security prison, known as El Altiplano, to collect the alleged narco kingpin Abigael González Valencia, or “El Cuini,” and transport him to a jail in Mexico City. Cuini, accused of being the financial brain of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, got the transfer because he had become a cooperator with Mexican investigators in one of the nation’s most horrific ever cases, the 2014 disappearance of 43 student teachers who attended the school of Ayotzinapa. His collaboration would help him delay for years his extradition to the United States, where he was indicted for meth and cocaine trafficking among other crimes.
This August, however, Mexican soldiers flew Cuini to Washington as part of a mass “expulsion” of 26 cartel operatives who the Mexican government claimed were a threat to national security. Cuini was considered of such importance that the head of the DEA, Terrance “Terry” Cole, went personally to escort him off the plane in handcuffs.
There is a big question as to what Cuini actually provided investigators to help solve the Ayotzinapa case, if anything. While Cuini was a top cartel operator in Jalisco state, the disappearance of the 43 students was carried out by the Guerreros Unidos cartel working with police in the city of Iguala, hundreds of miles away. Mexican government officials have made confused statements about Cuini’s role and not shown any concrete evidence or testimony provided by him on the disappearances.
A former federal investigator who worked on the Ayotzinapa case told CrashOut that Cuini gave nothing. “I can guarantee that he didn’t give a fucking thing to help the investigation,” he said. “He was from the wrong cartel.”
Cuini’s cooperation could be yet another black mark on a troubled investigation into a historic atrocity.
Former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, made some puzzling assertions about Cuini’s role in the Ayotzinapa case. In 2024, he wrote a letter to the parents of the disappeared students, in which he confirmed holding up the extradition of Cuini, but said the delay was part of an agreement with another collaborating witness, Gildardo López Astudillo, known as “El Cabo Gil.”
Gil is alleged to be a head of killers for the Guerreros Unidos and, according to AMLO, helped identify the remains of two of the missing students. Yet for a witness to demand that the government protect a major kingpin of a different cartel would indicate an extraordinary deal. And Gil is also a controversial witness who was arrested, freed and re-arrested and whose evidence is questionable.
Cuini and Gil are two of various cartel operatives who gained benefits while supposedly helping with the Ayotzinapa case during AMLO’s six-year term, which ended last year. They are symptomatic of deeper problems with the investigation.
The Ayotzinapa disappearances took place under the previous president Enrique Peña Nieto on Sept. 26, 2014, when the students ventured into the city of Iguala, in a heroin-producing region, to try and commandeer buses to take them to a protest. City police officers nabbed the students off the street and are believed to have handed them to the Guerreros Unidos mob, which trafficked heroin to Chicago, while other members of the security forces could also have been involved.
The charred remains of just three of the disappeared students have been identified while the other 40 are still unaccounted for. (Another three students were also murdered that night. You can read a detailed account of the attack here). The horror of the crime, innocence of the victims, and failure to find them made it a symbol of the violence ravaging Mexico and of the broken justice system.
AMLO’s election in 2018 prompted a genuine change in Mexico’s power structure and he promised to solve the Ayotzinapa case. He created a truth commission overseen by longtime ally Alejandro Encinas and a special investigative unit, initially headed by Omar Gómez Trejo, who had done human rights work for the United Nations. Prosecutors charged Peña Nieto’s old attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, who claimed to have discovered the “historic truth” of Ayotzinapa, with doing a cover up, and he is still under house arrest.
Yet the new investigation into Ayotzinapa suffered from various problems, including questionable use of narco witnesses, the alleged falsification of key evidence and irregular handling of prisoners. While the Ayotzinapa case was butchered under Peña Nieto, it became yet more twisted under AMLO.
Testimony from the narco witnesses was used to issue various arrest warrants against soldiers and officials that were thrown out. One of these was against the former attorney general of Guerrero, Iñaki Blanco, for organized crime in 2022. Blanco, a lawyer who has been involved in major cases in Mexico, told CrashOut that the warrant was based on absurd accusations and was easily dismissed.
“The only proof to issue this warrant, which I think was abhorrent, was the testimony of a criminal [Gil] that was plagued with errors and inconsistencies,” Blanco said. “They need to make transparent what the special investigative unit did in this time to give such a status to this criminal. Obviously a criminal will tell you what you want to hear. They are capable of selling their soul to the devil to get their freedom.”
Who Got Cuini Into The Case?
U.S. prosecutors also make suspicious deals with narco witnesses as I write about in this story. Yet even by those standards, the deal with Cuini raises questions. The actions of the investigators are still nebulous, but I go through what I have discovered on the intrigues here…
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