Next Thursday, September 26, will mark 10 years since 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero (on the South Pacific coast), disappeared in the city of Iguala by municipal police and members of a criminal organization known as Guerreros Unidos, with the complicity of members of the 27th Infantry Battalion of the Mexican Army stationed in that city.
The students traveled from Ayotzinapa to Iguala on that date, to hijack passenger trucks and use them to transport themselves to Mexico City, in order to participate in the annual commemoration of the October 2 student massacre, which recalls the murder of several dozen university students by the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970) in 1968, a few days before the start of the Olympic Games in Mexico, to end a student movement against his government and in favor of the democratization of the country.
On the night of September 26 and the early morning of September 27, 2014, the municipal police of Iguala, together with that of Cocula (a town near Iguala) fired on the students who were in the trucks and arrested most of them (some managed to escape), along with men in plain clothes who also attacked the students. During the night of the attack there were 6 dead, three of them students and another 3 civilians.
Later, the municipal police handed the students over to members of the criminal organization Guerreros Unidos, who took them away, apparently murdered them and made their bodies disappear.
The government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) covered up the participation of the 27th Infantry Battalion of the Army in these events, which at the very least, allowed the criminals to take the students, even though it knew in real time everything that was happening; and at the most, it participated in the disappearance of some of the boys, according to the investigations of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (a group of Latin American experts on human rights), who, under pressure from the boys' parents, demanded that they intervene in the investigation, since they did not trust the government.
Likewise, the international experts were able to discover that the real cause of the attack on the students was that one of the trucks they had hijacked to travel to Mexico City had a large shipment of cocaine that would leave in the following hours for the northern border, from where it would be transported to Chicago.
This drug smuggling operation was sponsored by the mayor and his wife, the criminal group Guerreros Unidos and the commanders of the 27th Infantry Battalion.
In other words, an entire criminal enterprise dedicated to drug trafficking, which was interrupted that night by the arrival of the students who took a bus full of drugs, which motivated the violent reaction of all those involved in this illegal trade.
The Peña Nieto government was aware of this situation, so it took on the task of covering up for the Army, so as not to tarnish its reputation, as well as the evident complicity of numerous municipal, state and federal authorities in drug trafficking. When Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024) came to power, he promised that there would be no impunity, that everything that had happened would be clarified and that no one would be protected.
López Obrador created a Truth Commission that would be in charge of clarifying everything and a special prosecutor's office that would prosecute criminal cases; but at the time when the investigation came across the participation of the military in the events, and despite the fact that 4 soldiers from the 27th Infantry Battalion have been formally imprisoned for what happened; the high command of the Army pressured for the special prosecutor of the case to be removed from his position, and the Undersecretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, who headed the Truth Commission, was forced to resign from his post.
All of this has left the case unsolved, even though the mayor of Iguala and his wife were arrested for other crimes related to the murder of some peasant leaders that were ordered by Abarca and his wife, but not for the disappearance of the students. And in the same way, several members of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group have been arrested, without being able to clarify the whereabouts of the boys.
The parents of the students, their lawyers and members of non-governmental human rights organizations who have accompanied the parents in their struggle to find their children have pointed out that the López Obrador government ended up acting the same or even worse than that of Peña Nieto, since it had promised not to protect anyone and to clarify the incident, and ended up doing the same as the previous government, with the aggravating factor that it claimed to be a fair, moral government and different from the previous ones.
On Thursday, when 10 years have passed since this shameful incident, the people of Mexico will be able to continue to attest that all the country's leaders are equally dishonest, liars and more concerned with staying in power than in resolving the demands and needs of the people they claim to represent.
So very sad indeed. I closely followed this travesty for so many years. Just hoped against hope some justice would come, but I had little faith that it would. Your investigative report shines a light on how things came down. I had heard parts of it, and you put in perspective, including the political aspects (very disheartening, though not surprising). Good post.