Missing students of Ayotzinapa were tortured in Cocula: PGR

Hours before disappearing, eight teachers in training of Ayotzinapa were kept and allegedly tortured in a safe house in Cocula, Guerrero, the investigation carried out by the Attorney General's Office (PGR) revealed.

The safe house, located by the Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC) of the PGR, was controlled by the leader of Guerreros Unidos in Cocula, Gildardo López Astudillo, “El Gil”, and the former Deputy Director of Public Safety of Cocula, César Nava González, a member of the Army before becoming a police chief.

Authorities found bloodstains of a person who had been kidnapped days before the disappearance of the 43 students, which shows that the criminal organization operated freely in Cocula, whose mayor, César Miguel Peñaloza Santana, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has been charged with alleged links to Guerreros Unidos. However, the PGR was unable to obtain an arrest warrant against him by a federal judge.

Moreover, ministerial authorities have several phone call logs between police and the criminals allegedly involved in the kidnapping and disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa in which they refer to the victims as "packages". In some of those conversations the interolocutors said that the former deputy director of Public Security of Iguala, Francisco Salgado Valladares, and César Nava, had not agreed where to take the students next.

The investigation revealed that the eight students taken to the safe house in Cocula stayed first at Lomas del Zapatero. Valladares ordered to take them to Cocula in a truck that turned out to be the payment of a kidnapping committed by Guerreros Unidos weeks before the disappearance of the teachers in training.

According to the report of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), there are four possible destinations for the students of Ayotzinapa: a place in Pueblo Viejo, Iguala; a safe house in Lomas del Zapatero, Iguala; Cocula's dump, where they were allegedly incinerated, and now the aforementioned safe house in Cocula.