Serafín Zambada’s Name Fabricated in Ayotzinapa File

A thorough review of the case file shows how authorities tried to link the Ayotzinapa case to drug trafficking through Serafín Zambada, while concealing its true nature as a state crime.

By Guadalupe Lizárraga

One of the Pascal Bourne Group analysts, consulted by Los Ángeles Press, confirmed that in the review of “hundreds of thousands of pages” from the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) files on the Iguala case, only two isolated references were found to Serafín Zambada Ortiz, son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.

One of these mentions appears in a ministerial request dated December 24, 2015, within preliminary inquiry AP/PGR/SDHPDSC/OI/001/2015, when federal prosecutor Edgar Nieves Osornio, assigned to the Office of Investigation of the Deputy Attorney’s Office for Human Rights, Crime Prevention and Community Services, requested background information from the Federal Police on “a person by the name of Zambada Serafín.”

The second reference appears in Volume 160, folios 782 to 784, of the FGR file, where multiple security agencies —including CISEN, Plataforma México, and the Guerrero State Public Security Secretariat— were asked to provide information about him.

Request for criminal records of Serafín Zambada

Response to the request for Serafín Zambada’s records

Beyond these two administrative notes, there is no connection whatsoever to the investigation into the disappearance of the 42 Ayotzinapa students and the infiltrated soldier. “Serafín is the only mention in the file; it has nothing to do with the students. We found no link between that Serafín and the investigation, but since his name appears in those two notes, we had to leave it on record. I repeat: there is no connection, and I can’t imagine why it’s even in the file,” explained the Pascal Bourne Group analyst.

The Official and Police Narrative

Since 2014, federal authorities—led by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) and the Federal Police—had upheld the hypothesis that the students were mistaken for members of Los Rojos, rivals of Guerreros Unidos. Under this logic, the disappearance was explained as an attack stemming from a cartel dispute.

In this context, the Federal Police’s insertion of Serafín Zambada’s name into the case file falls into a broader pattern of attempts to link the Iguala case to larger drug trafficking structures, even in the absence of supporting evidence.

On September 26, 2014, the name of Serafín Zambada was already making headlines in both Mexican and U.S. media, as he had pleaded guilty to drug trafficking in San Diego, California, where he was born. He admitted to smuggling 100 kilograms of cocaine and one ton of marijuana from Mexico into the United States. He was released from prison four years later, in September 2018.

The Role of Anabel Hernández in the Narrative

That same storyline was amplified in Mexican media by journalist Anabel Hernández, who publicly insisted on the involvement of drug cartels in the disappearance of the students.

In her 2016 book La verdadera noche de Iguala (The True Night of Iguala), Hernández argued that the students’ disappearance was tied to a drug trafficking operation. She claimed the students had unknowingly boarded a bus loaded with heroin belonging to Guerreros Unidos bound for Chicago, which allegedly triggered the attack.

This thesis was heavily criticized because it framed the tragedy within a drug trafficking dispute, thereby reinforcing the PGR’s narrative that sought to explain the case as a cartel feud while diverting attention away from the role of the Army and the State.

Although these versions were widely circulated and shaped public perception of the case, documentary analysis shows they lacked any basis. In the judicial file, Serafín Zambada Ortiz appears only tangentially, through the Federal Police’s request for information, but with no link whatsoever to the students or to the September 26, 2014 attack.

Contrast with the Pascal Report

What the Pascal Report demonstrates is that within the FGR case file, there is no documentary evidence linking the students to drug trafficking, nor tying figures such as Serafín Zambada to the disappearance. This is no minor finding: it confirms that the FGR file was used to plant isolated references to drug traffickers in order to sustain the narrative of a criminal dispute, when in fact it was a state crime.

The contrast between official documentation and the public narrative reveals a clear pattern of manipulation: while authorities and certain journalists insisted on criminalizing the students through alleged ties to drug trafficking, the volumes of the FGR case file show that such connections simply did not exist.