On the night of September 26, 2014, police attacked 43 student teachers from the rural teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, and the young men vanished in the city of Iguala. Six people died that night, three of them other students. Twelve years later, remains of only three of the 43 have been identified, and not one person has been convicted of their disappearance or murder, according to the Associated Press.
The families marked the anniversary with a march of tens of thousands from the Angel of Independence to Mexico City’s Zócalo. Their complaint was simple: the government still has not released all the evidence.
A story that fell apart
The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto said local police handed the students to a gang, which killed them and burned the bodies at a landfill near Cocula. It called this the “historical truth.” An Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, began work in 2015 and rejected the account. Its forensic analysis found the cremation claim impossible under the conditions officials described, and its reports exposed falsified records, destroyed evidence and torture of detainees.
In 2022 the group’s third report went further. It documented the military’s surveillance of the college and the manipulation of the Cocula site by members of the Navy. Navy drone footage, kept secret for more than seven years, showed marines and Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam at the landfill before the official “discovery.” López Obrador’s own Truth Commission conceded that the case was a “state crime” and that the first investigation had been a deliberate cover-up.
Arrests, reversals, acquittals
Murillo Karam was charged in 2022 and remains under house arrest, untried. Tomás Zerón, who headed the Criminal Investigation Agency, fled to Israel, which has refused Mexico’s extradition request. Warrants went out in August 2022 for 20 soldiers and officers, five Guerrero officials, 44 police officers and 14 members of the Guerreros Unidos gang. Within weeks prosecutors cancelled 21 of the 83 warrants, 16 of them against soldiers, and special prosecutor Omar Gómez Trejo resigned in protest. Seventeen soldiers have been prosecuted since. None has been convicted.
Former Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca, accused of ordering police to detain the students, was acquitted of kidnapping them in 2023, and the ruling was upheld on appeal. He stays in prison on other charges. Col. José Rodríguez Pérez, later promoted to general, was charged over six students allegedly held in a warehouse. A judge released him on bail in July 2024.
On August 6 federal prosecutors arrested former Guerrero governor Ángel Aguirre, who left office in October 2014. Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said two testimonies show he ordered security-camera footage from the night destroyed. The recordings captured security forces stopping a bus outside the Palace of Justice, yet early official statements said no such footage existed. The Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, which represents the families, said neither parents nor lawyers had been told of the arrest. Clemente Rodríguez, father of one of the students, said Aguirre “has to tell everything he knows.”
The September 28 report
Two days after the march, the Sheinbaum government presented a new report. The families were not invited. Based on a reanalysis of about 80,000 phone records, it found that the phones of three of the missing students were used afterward by a former Iguala official, a police officer and the wife of a municipal official. Special unit head Mauricio Pazarán said investigators can now reconstruct who communicated with whom that night, and identified 17 people never investigated before.
The report also suggests some students may have been taken to funeral homes and the morgue so that evidence could be burned. One lead reached Rodolfo Rueda, owner of the El Ángel funeral home, who used the phone of slain student Julio César Mondragón Fontes on October 4, 2014. Searches turned up bone fragments and an unregistered crematorium oven. Rueda and three relatives are under arrest; none of the remains analyzed so far match the students.
The World Socialist Web Site, which called the report a political operation, noted that the Army still defies a February 19 federal court order to release about 850 pages of intelligence records. President Claudia Sheinbaum has relayed the Army’s claim that the documents do not exist. “No one is being covered up,” she said on September 21. The independent experts’ group left in July 2023, citing military refusal to share information, and Sheinbaum has said it “no longer exists.”
One father told the AP at the march: “The one who controls the country is the Army, that much is clear to me now.”
Sources
- Former Mexican governor arrested over alleged cover-up in missing students case
- 12 years since disappearance of Ayotzinapa students: The cover-up continues
- Former Mexican governor arrested over alleged cover-up in missing students case
