September 26 marked the ninth anniversary of the forced disappearance of forty-three students in the Mexican city of Iguala in the southwestern State of Guerrero. Nine years later, the victims’ families are still demanding answers.
“It’s complicated. You’re looking for your son, and the government denies you justice,” Antonio Tizapa, the father of one of the missing students, told NBC. “If they don’t want us to keep protesting in the streets, tell us where our children are.”
The case became the most emblematic and infamous human rights case in recent history in Mexico.
The case became the most emblematic and infamous human rights case in recent history in Mexico. The case gained international spotlight from the media at all levels, generating articles, books, and graphic novels.
In 2014, the students, who were from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa, were traveling to Mexico City for a demonstration to mark the forty-sixth anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre. En route, they were intercepted and attacked by local police who then, officials later claimed, handed them over to a local cartel that killed and burned their bodies.
In the nine years since, the remains of only three of the students have been identified.
The disappearance of the students led to international outcry.
Luis Alvaz, CC BY-SA 4.0
March for the missing forty-three of Ayotzinapa outside the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, Mexico, November 2014.
Then-President Enrique Peña Nieto and his administration sought to quickly close the case by blaming drug traffickers. According to the government, the students were mistaken for members of a rival gang. But this conclusion was met with skepticism from human rights defenders, leading to widespread protests.
Upon entering office in December 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised to expose the truth of what occurred that night in 2014. An independent truth commission, known as the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, was formed to look into the case.
Hope for solving the case emerged in August 2023 when a judge issued arrest warrants for eighty-three people, including twenty military commanders and troops from Iguala, as well as local police and members of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group. Police also arrested former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, who was considered a suspect in abetting the massacre.
But it wasn’t long before twenty-one of the eighty-three arrest warrants were withdrawn, leading to condemnation from investigators. In September 2022, the special investigator for the Ayotzinapa case, Omar Gómez Trejo abruptly resigned his position and was forced into exile.
In July 2023, the commission presented evidence that showed that authorities at the federal, state, and local level had collaborated with drug cartels in carrying out the students’ disappearance, calling it a “State crime.” In their final report, the investigators denounced the hindrance of their investigation by the Mexican state and the country’s military.
“The fact that the Special Prosecutor’s investigation began to zero in on the Mexican army as a perpetrator not only in the cover-up of this crime but in the crime itself, through ties between the military and organized crime, was a death knell for the case.,” Kate Doyle, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, tells The Progressive. “It’s emblematic of Mexican impunity.”.
The United States has remained largely silent about the case. Attempts by Doyle and the National Security Archive to request information through the Freedom of Information Act have proven frustrating due to a lack of information in the documents. But many of the declassified documents Doyle and the National Security Archive have obtained have been heavily redacted.
“The U.S. tiptoes around sensitive issues like human rights issues,”—Kate Doyle
“The U.S. tiptoes around sensitive issues like human rights issues,” Doyle says. “[There is] extreme caution on the part of the U.S. to release information that is in any way critical of Mexico in this case.”
What is known is that at the time of the disappearance, according to Doyle, is that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had intercepted communications from the cartel in Guerrero.
“The U.S. had a drug trafficking operator at a counter drug operation investigation in Chicago in 2013 and [20]14,” Doyle says. “The DEA was vacuuming up all of these texts for the course over the course of months. These texts are chock full of information about how organized crime functions in Iguala and one of the things that it’s full of is references to the military and the police.”
Wotancito, CC BY-SA 4.0
Demonstration by the fathers and mothers of Ayotzinapa, October 2017.
As the truth and justice remain elusive, the quest to find clarity about what happened that night in 2014 will continue. For the families, the loss and the lack of justice for their children continue to remain.
The ninth anniversary of the disappearance was marked by widespread demonstrations from student groups and activists in Mexico City. Much like the commemoration of the anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre that the forty-three students were traveling to back in 2014, the anniversary of their disappearance will continue to be marked by protests and commemoration each year in Mexico.