Keeping The Secrets - U.S. Silence About Ayotzinapa - National Security Archive

26/9/23, 10:19 Keeping the Secrets: U.S.
Silence about Ayotzinapa | National Security Archive
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Keeping the Secrets: U.S. Silence about

Ayotzinapa
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/mexico-ayotzinapa/2023-09-26/keeping-secrets-us-silence-about-ayotzinapa 1/25
26/9/23, 10:19 Keeping the Secrets: U.S. Silence about Ayotzinapa | National Security Archive
Broken FOIA, Indiscriminate Use of B5 Exemption

“Mexican Sensitivities” Trump Transparency
Agencies Still Withholding Documents on “Human
Rights Crisis” in Mexico
Published: Sep 26, 2023

Briefing Book #: 843
Edited by Kate Doyle and

Claire Dorfman
Special thanks to Lauren Harper for contributing research
For more information, contact:

202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Subjects: Crime and Narcotics

Human Rights and Genocide
Political Crimes and Abuse of Power
Regions: Mexico and Central America
Project: Mexico
Protestors gather in Mexico City to protest the Ayotzinapa disappearances.

Credit: Ruido en la Red/Twitter
The National Palace in Mexico City installed barricades in anticipation of

protests ahead of the 9th anniversary of the attacks against the students.
Credit: Carlos Guzmán Martín/Twitter
Washington, D.C., September 26, 2023 - Nine years ago today, 43 Mexican
college students were violently abducted and disappeared by police and
drug traffickers in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. As the families of the
missing boys mark another wrenching anniversary and the investigation in
Mexico grinds on, the National Security Archive takes a look at the
declassified record on Ayotzinapa in the United States and asks, Why has the
U.S. government released so little information about this case?
Since 2017, the National Security Archive and our colleagues at the Center
for Investigative Reporting (CIR) have filed over 150 Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) requests about the attacks against the students of the Ayotzinapa
teacher-training school, the investigations that followed, and a related DEA
operation targeting Mexican drug traffickers who were distributing huge
quantities of heroin in Chicago, Illinois. We hoped to obtain new facts about
a case that had been muddied and obscured by investigators in Mexico. We
also wanted to know whether the shocking crime had any impact on U.S.
policy in Mexico. Did the revelations about the case affect U.S.-Mexico
relations? In particular, did concerns about Ayotzinapa have any impact on
the longstanding cooperation between the two countries in waging the so-
called “war on drugs”?
Yet despite our many requests – and the filing of two FOIA lawsuits – over
the years we have received what amounts to crumbs: news clips, public
reports, transcripts from press conferences, emails so heavily redacted as to
be illegible, and thousands of censored pages of “unclassified” documents.
The secrecy is especially puzzling given the intense concern expressed by
American officials at the time of the attacks and throughout the years since
then. In 2014, President Barack Obama called the mass disappearance an
“outrageous tragedy.” The State Department said it was a “terrible
crime.” A bipartisan group of United States senators urged then-Secretary
of State John Kerry to press Mexico to investigate and “help bring closure
to the victims’ families.” Year after year, the State Department’s annual
human rights report on Mexico reviews the status of the Ayotzinapa case
and underscores the impunity that fueled it.
But U.S. concern has not translated into U.S. transparency, and most of the
relevant records remain closed to public scrutiny. In this posting, we’ll
examine the two most likely reasons. First, and most broadly, the right to
information in the United States has deteriorated sharply in recent years,
with an overburdened classification system and an increasingly
dysfunctional FOIA. Many of the agency responses we got to our Ayotzinapa
requests demonstrate a deterioration of the public’s right to know.
Second, U.S. administrations have long been cautious about publicizing any
differences, however mild, they may have with Mexico. After all, the United
States relies on its partnership with Mexico to carry out two of its most
important (and controversial) policy priorities: migration and the drug war.
Is access to U.S. information about Mexico constrained by the same official
caution? Is silence safer?
The Freedom of Information Act is Broken: Ayotzinapa

Edition
It won’t be breaking news to readers of the National Security Archive’s
website to say that government secrecy is on the rise in the United States –
and has been for decades. The end of the Cold War ushered in a brief but
shining period of openness during the 1990s, when the Clinton
administration announced it would treat government information with a
new “presumption of disclosure.” Hundreds of millions of pages of agency
documents were declassified before the 9/11 attacks brought an abrupt halt
to the transparency trends and the tide of secrecy surged to new heights.
The Freedom of Information Act has not fared well in the Information Age.
The Biden administration’s effort to update declassification rules appear to
have stalled, and agencies are struggling to manage the explosion of
electronic records as the government goes digital. At the same time, the
National Archives – the institution responsible for safeguarding and
providing access to the country’s historical records – has seen its budget
stagnate in real dollars for nearly 30 years. Backlogged FOIA requests

have steadily grown since 2012, meaning agencies aren’t keeping pace with
their responses; in FY 2020, the government was behind by about 150,000
requests. In 2022, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the
right to information that pointed to poor FOIA performance across federal
agencies, a lackluster commitment to openness by the new Biden
administration, and no consequences for agencies that fail to comply with
the law.
Even senior officials have spoken out about the failings of the secrecy
system. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines has repeatedly
expressed concerns about overclassification – that is, the tendency of
agencies to stamp billions of records “secret” automatically. In a keynote
speech at the LBJ Presidential Library in January 2023, Haines called
overclassification an “urgent challenge,” one that undermines key
democratic values such as “increasing transparency to promote an informed
citizenry and greater accountability and … the basic trust that the public has
in its government…” (See minute 6:05)
This context of overclassification, FOIA backlogs, and poor agency

performance may explain why the U.S. government has released so little
information about the notorious Ayotzinapa case. The inadequacy of the
responses is consistent across all six agencies (CIA, DEA, Justice, State,
Defense Intelligence Agency, and U.S. Northern Command), and the
disappointing returns fall into several broad categories.
1. Information released comes directly from media

reports
In response to our requests, most of the six agencies wasted our time (and
theirs) by “declassifying” public, open-source information obtained through
media reports. For example, the CIA sent 27 partially declassified documents
containing fragments of text about aspects of the Ayotzinapa case, all
derived from reports by press outlets such as the Associated Press or (in this
example) Mexico’s El Universal.
Among the documents released by the DEA, the agency included 630 pages
of “KNRs” – a compilation of news clips distributed within the agency by the
DEA’s field division in Phoenix, AZ.
2. Information denied, illegible information, and

arbitrary redactions
Every agency withheld multiple documents citing various FOIA exemptions.
Some agencies didn’t specify how many records were denied in full, leaving
us in the dark as to the scope of their review (and the appropriateness of
their denials). They included the Department of Justice, the agency charged
with overseeing the proper functioning of the FOIA for the federal
government.
We also received some information that was so heavily excised as to be

unreadable, even in the case of records marked “unclassified.” In several
instances, we received different versions of a single document with entirely
different redactions – a graphic demonstration of the arbitrariness of the
FOIA review process as a whole.
For example, the State Department released three versions of a cable sent
on February 5, 2020, titled Mexico: López Obrador Administration Has Mixed
Results on Human Rights. The cable is marked “sensitive but unclassified”
and contains bland observations about the Mexican government’s human
rights record. One version was disclosed in full (except for the names of
State Department employees). But two subsequent versions withheld

portions of even the most innocuous comments about Mexico’s human
rights policy – beginning with the document’s title itself (Document 8).
The FOIA reviewers of these two redacted versions evidently did not agree
on what text qualified as “national security information” since they redacted
different sections of the same record under the B1 exemption. It is
impossible to make sense of their declassification decisions when you
compare the versions side by side.
3. Abuse of the B5 exemption

By far the most common abuse of the declassification process in the records
released to us is the heavy-handed reliance on the FOIA’s Exemption 5 to
censor huge swathes of text in unclassified records. The exemption allows
agencies to withhold certain intra-agency and deliberative documents (such
as drafts), but FOIA users have noted for years the government’s
indiscriminate use of B5 to shield all kinds of information, whether or not it
could legitimately be considered “deliberative.”
In the case of the Ayotzinapa documents, the B5 functioned like an invasive

weed, popping up repeatedly and extensively in hundreds of pages released
to us. The Department of State was the worst offender. Time and time again,
State Department reviewers withheld records under B5 that did not fit the
criteria established by the law.
Take a look, for example, at a one-page backgrounder from December 2014

that discusses the students’ disappearance and the Mexican government’s
investigation.
In this “sensitive but unclassified” text, an official in State’s Bureau of

Western Hemisphere Affairs lays out the facts about what happened, two
and a half months after the 43 boys went missing. Calling the case a
“political crisis” for President Peña Nieto, the document is blunt:
The disappearances, missteps in the investigation and discovery of many
unmarked graves, galvanized massive public outrage over indiscriminate
violence, cartel influence over public officials, poor state-local-federal
cooperation, and weak rule of law.
There is no way to justify the withholding of this document as an “intra-

agency” communication (unless everything sent from one official to another
within the State Department qualifies as such) or as a draft. The use of
Exemption 5 in this case is simply contrary to the law.
What did we learn?
Despite the government’s censorship of information released on Ayotzinapa

over the years, the documents declassified in response to our FOIA requests
do have a story to tell. It’s clear that the United States was fully aware of the
enormity of the crime, the urgent need for a rapid and credible response by
Mexico, and the Peña Nieto administration’s failure to deliver it. The U.S.
also knew that – contrary to Mexico’s narrative about what happened, which
claimed that small-time criminals partnered with local corrupt police to
disappear the boys – the forces behind the disappearances were powerful
and had allies at every level of the Mexican government.
We received declassified reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration

that revealed new information about Guerreros Unidos, the Iguala-based
criminal group that colluded with security forces to kidnap (and likely kill)
the students. In 2014, Guerreros Unidos had a robust drug trafficking
business bringing narcotics north from Iguala into the United States. A DEA
investigation out of Chicago tracked their operations for months, resulting
in indictments of eight members. The 2015 DEA intelligence report released
to us conveys the magnitude of Guerreros Unidos’ infiltration of the
Midwestern narcotics market at that time – when the Peña Nieto

government was still describing the GU as a local gang of thugs (Document
1).
Three years after the DEA broke up the Chicago GU cell – and despite an
“intense crackdown” by Mexican authorities due to the gang’s role in
kidnapping the 43 students – a 2017 DEA report about Guerreros Unidos
calls them a “growing concern.” According to the report, Guerreros Unidos
was stronger than ever, had expanded its presence beyond Chicago into
Atlanta, Austin, Houston, and NYC, and was considering new routes into
Washington State (Document 2).
Weeks after the 43 boys were disappeared, the Mexican president published
a new, 10-point plan to address “long-standing problems of violence,
impunity, and corruption,” but the State Department was skeptical. In order
to reduce violence and rebuild public trust, wrote one official, “the plan will
need support from the main political parties and a stronger focus on
strengthening the rule of law than the administration has yet shown”
(Document 4). As the years went by, U.S. officials voiced increasing doubts
about Mexico’s capacity to explain what happened to the students and
actually bring the perpetrators to justice. In one 2018 document, the State
Department described mounting cases of forced disappearance in Mexico as
a “human rights crisis,” and reviewed the series of disasters associated with
the Ayotzinapa case in particular: the government’s failure to prosecute
anyone for the crime, its use of torture against some suspects, and its
fabrication of evidence (Document 7).
Beyond skepticism about the case, Washington faced a real choice: would
the disappearance of the 43 students and the Peña Nieto government’s
blatant manipulation of the investigation have an impact on U.S. policy
toward Mexico? The Mexican military was a key ally – not only in the
decades-long drug war that targeted traffickers in the country, but also in
helping slow the flow of migrants over the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico’s
military leaders denied the armed forces were involved in the crime, but the
families of the 43 strongly suspected military involvement in what happened
to their sons. One month after the attacks, the DIA reported on nationwide
protests over Ayotzinapa and suggested that any increase in the army’s
presence in Guerrero “could provoke violence” (Document 3).
The United States had mechanisms in place to respond to military human

rights abuses. Since 2009, Congress has required that human rights-related
conditions be met before U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) assistance
and training go to Mexico’s security forces. The annual evaluations are
imposed through the State Department’s so-called 15- and 25-percent
reports. As a consequence of heightened U.S. concerns about the military’s
human rights record during the Peña Nieto administration (including about
Ayotzinapa), FMF funds were withheld in FYs 2014 and 2017. Despite this, the
Pentagon still reported “unprecedented levels of coordination” between the
U.S. and Mexico. A set of talking points from the U.S. Northern Command
insisted that the Mexican military was a trusted institution and a strategic
partner for the United States, despite widespread allegations of human
rights violations (Document 10).
Some members of Congress tried to get the U.S. to increase pressure on
Mexico to respect human rights. Rep. Alan Lowenthal pushed the State
Department in 2016 to condition aid to Mexico, citing the Mexican
government’s failure to cooperate with international experts on the
Ayotzinapa investigation (Document 5). Two years after the disappearance
of the Ayotzinapa students, Senate staffer Tim Rieser met with Deputy
Assistant Secretary John Creamer to express his extreme frustration with the
State Department’s decision to provide the full amount of FMF funds that
year. Rieser called the Peña Nieto administration “corrupt and abusive” and
the Government of Mexico “a criminal enterprise,” noting its defensive
reaction to U.S. pressure to improve its human rights record. The decision to
allow the funds reinforced impunity and allowed the Mexican army to
continue to be “unaccountable,” according to the Senate staffer. But even
Congress, Rieser noted, had toned down efforts to condition security
funding to Mexico, “in deference to Mexican sensitivities” (Document 6).
“Mexican sensitivities”
“Mexican sensitivities” is a cliché of U.S.-Mexico relations – references go
back to the first iteration of the drug war in 1969, when Nixon’s State
Department asked the U.S. Embassy in Mexico for a read on “Mexican
sensitivities” in the event that the U.S. unilaterally closed the border to halt
the flow of drugs. (Spoiler alert: The U.S. did, and Mexico was sensitive.)
They were invoked again in 1973 when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
was trying to convince Mexico to accept U.S. helicopters to step up poppy-
and marijuana-eradication campaigns promoted by the United States. And
again, Mexico expressed sensitivities – this time about U.S. drug
enforcement activities proliferating on Mexican territory.
The concept of Mexican sensitivities in U.S. foreign policy circles has typically
related to Mexican concerns about national sovereignty in the face of U.S.
actions that threaten to undermine Mexico’s autonomy and ability to self-
govern. But what Tim Rieser was expressing to John Creamer in 2016 was
something else – something that might better be dubbed “U.S.
sensitivities.” His disappointment was that the United States was unwilling
to truly pressure Mexico to solve the Ayotzinapa case – to locate the boys’
remains, arrest their suspected killers, hold trials, and convict those found
responsible.
The conditioning of security assistance programs on good human rights

performance gives the U.S. some influence over Mexico, but the U.S. has
been unwilling to use that leverage to push Mexico to make the army
accountable, root out corruption, and support victims, fearing that efforts to
do so could lead to a backlash and complicate bilateral cooperation on two
of the most politically charged issues in Washington: migration and
counternarcotics. Perhaps that’s why U.S. agencies have been so reluctant
to reveal even unclassified U.S. documents about Ayotzinapa and continue
to conceal what U.S. agencies know about one of Mexico’s most egregious
human rights cases.
THE DOCUMENTS
Drug Enforcement Administration

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26/9/23, 10:19 Keeping the Secrets: U.S.

Silence about Ayotzinapa | National Security Archive

35+ YEARS OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTION

Join Email List

Site search Search

Keeping the Secrets: U.S. Silence about

Broken FOIA, Indiscriminate Use of B5 Exemption

Published: Sep 26, 2023

Edited by Kate Doyle and

For more information, contact:

Subjects: Crime and Narcotics

Protestors gather in Mexico City to protest the Ayotzinapa disappearances.

The National Palace in Mexico City installed barricades in anticipation of

The Freedom of Information Act is Broken: Ayotzinapa

stagnate in real dollars for nearly 30 years. Backlogged FOIA requests

This context of overclassification, FOIA backlogs, and poor agency

1. Information released comes directly from media

2. Information denied, illegible information, and

We also received some information that was so heavily excised as to be

State Department employees). But two subsequent versions withheld

3. Abuse of the B5 exemption

In the case of the Ayotzinapa documents, the B5 functioned like an invasive

Take a look, for example, at a one-page backgrounder from December 2014

In this “sensitive but unclassified” text, an official in State’s Bureau of

There is no way to justify the withholding of this document as an “intra-

What did we learn?

Despite the government’s censorship of information released on Ayotzinapa

We received declassified reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration

Midwestern narcotics market at that time – when the Peña Nieto

The United States had mechanisms in place to respond to military human

The conditioning of security assistance programs on good human rights

Drug Enforcement Administration

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