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The Lady of Iguala

I am intrigued with a column by Luis Hernandez in La Jornada, about the lady Iguala, aka, Maria de Los Angeles Abarca Pineda, who was the wife of the mayor of Iguala when the 43 students of Ayotzinapa went missing in 2014.  She came from fairly humble origins - her parents being market vendors. But the family also sold drugs locally.  Pineda’s brothers all became narcos and three of them were killed in their line of work.  The surviving brother, Salvador, is thought to be the chief of the drug organization Guerreros Unidos, who allegedly played a role in the disappearance of the 43 normalistas.  Much of the fortune of Pineda and her husband, Jose Luis Albarca, came from the drug money being reinvested into licit enterprises. The couple owned more than 60 properties, the crown jewel of their throne being the ownership of a shopping mall outside Iguala.  Hernandez notes that 

Cuando en mayo de 2009 la entonces Secretaría de Seguridad Pública federal anunció la captura de 14 presuntos integrantes del grupo de los Beltrán Leyva, dio a conocer que La familia Pineda Villa cuenta con una red de corrupción y protección institucional en los estados de Morelos y Guerrero, quienes además de brindarles protección, informan de las acciones emprendidas por parte de la autoridad.”

Among the detained were the parents of Pineda. For his part, the husband, Jose Luis Albarca, tried to separate himself from the affairs of his in-laws. But Pineda was the active member of the couple, making business decisions and making political contributions of the PRD so that she could succeed her husband as the mayor of Iguala. She also paid 80 police between 2-3 million pesos per month for the work they did for Guerreros Unidos.  The night of the disappearances, when she was unveiling her mayoral candidacy, Pineda said she knew nothing of what happened to the normalistas.  But she made 25 calls that evening, including one with the chief of the 27th military battalion, stationed near Iguala.  The mayor also had close relations with the governor of Guerrero, Angel Heladio Aquirre, who, in his own right, maintained close ties with the Cartel Independiente de Acapulco, which, in turn, was allied with Guerreros Unidos. 

All of this is to suggest that Ayotzinapa was not just the work of local actors - which is what the government of EPN asserted when they arrested all of the local cops, the local politicians and various peasants who - the government asserted, were linked to the narco groups. Rather it was a crime of the state, involving state functionaries, the army, and the narco trafficking groups they were connected with.  

Two general points follow from all of this.  The first is that the story of Pineda’s family - their wealth and their political connections - illustrates the way in which narco-trafficking served as a means for subaltern people to achieve social mobility and become part of a narco-political power structure within the state of Guerrero. The other point, of course, is simply the scope of these corruption networks and the efforts of the federal government to shield them from accountability, particularly the military, which has refused to yield to any investigative oversight in the wake of Ayotzinapa.  One wonders if this will continue with the Truth Commission that AMLO has appointed to investigate the events of Ayotzinapa. One thing is for sure, though, Pineda is not talking.  Note that this article was written back in 2015, when Pineda was transferred from house arrest to maximum security prison in Nayrit for narco-trafficking related crime. 

A follow up to this story is the arrest of EPN’s attorney general, Karam Murillo, in Mexico City for his participation in the state’s coverup of Ayotzinapa (according to the Mexican government, the charges were “forced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice”). Also significant were other 83 indictments that the government handed out to military officers, police officers, and cartel members.  Particularly notable here is the targeting of the military, which contrasts, quite notably, with the way in which AMLO’s government has elevated the security role of the military and provided it with additional roles in the development of government funded megaprojects and the administration of non-military governmental services. Of course, the question that many pose in Mexico is whether indictments will lead to prosecutions. 





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