Arrest Warrant Issued Against Former Intelligence Chief

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

The prosecution accuses him of forced disappearance, torture, communications intervention and coalition of public servants; he has been a fugitive for 11 weeks.

Ignacio Mendoza Gandaria, former commander of the Center for Research and National Security (CISEN), has had an arrest warrant since June 20 and so far he has accumulated almost 11 weeks of being a fugitive. 

Accused of four serious crimes related to the Ayotzinapa case, he is the first member of a Mexican intelligence agency to be brought to justice for grievances committed during his service.

The charges filed against Mendoza are for forced disappearance of people, torture, intervention of communications without judicial authorization and coalition of public servants. The first two are considered human rights violations, because they were committed by a public servant and, in addition, crimes against humanity because they were carried out in a widespread and systematic manner by agents of the State.

Control judge Felipe de Jesús Delgadillo Padierna, of the Federal Criminal Justice Center in the South Prison, gave the arrest warrant to the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR), of criminal case 72/2022, considering that Mendoza Gandaria unjustifiably breached the order to present himself at his second indictment hearing.

On the first one, on June 3, Mendoza's lawyer alleged that he and his wife had salmonellosis and that he had not had time to read the file, so he requested a postponement. The judge granted it with the warning that, if the private defense was not ready, the public defense would be in charge.

Both the accused and his representative had connected to the session via digital means. But Mendoza didn't appear on June 20. His lawyer, Javier Avendaño Sandoval, presented the simple photostatic copy of a covid-19 certificate when claiming that Mendoza was sick, but the judge considered that "it was not whether he wanted to connect online or not, it was an obligation to appear," and asked the FGR to verify the authenticity of the medical certificate.

That same afternoon, in a private hearing, the judge issued the arrest warrant, which so far has not been able to be executed by the Federal Ministerial Police.

Long espionage career

Mendoza Gandaria, current director of Operations of the National Intelligence Center (CNI, second position of the organization, under its general director Audomaro Martínez Zapata), occupied that same position in the now disbanded CISEN (then headed by Eugenio Ímaz Gispert) when he committed the alleged crimes of which he is accused, and has a career of almost three decades in espionage and intelligence tasks. 

The criminal proceedings against him is part of the tasks of the Special Investigation and Litigation Unit of the Ayotzinapa Case, headed by Special Prosecutor Omar Gómez Trejo, specifically with regard to the assembly of the so-called "historical truth" of former prosecutor Jesús Murillo Karam (also accused).

With the then director of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Tomás Zerón de Lucio, and the head of the Anti-Kidnapping Unit, Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez, Mendoza Gandaria is one of the senior officials who appear in interrogation videos in which torture of detainees is practiced to force them to incriminate themselves and testify according to a narrative of the facts previously elaborated.

In addition, another video shows that Mendoza Gandaria conducted another session of violent questions about the suspect Felipe Rodríguez Salgado, El Cepillo. According to the FGR, the association with other officials configures the crime of coalition of public servants, and the extraction of data from Rodríguez Salgado's cell phone, that of communications intervention.

The case of forced disappearance is based on the fact that, given that a judge had issued two arrest warrants against Rodríguez Salgado, the detainee should have been brought before the agent of the Public Ministry or the judge himself immediately after his arrest, which occurred on January 15. 2015 at 11:00 p.m., but this did not happen until 4:00 a.m. the next day. 

Theses acts of Rodríguez Salgado represents a "pattern of incrimination against a certain group of people," says the prosecution: young people with limited resources, with little education and from rural areas. In other words, the authorities previously defined a profile of the type of people they were going to blame for the crimes in Iguala.

Milenio