43 Students Still Missing in Mexico
This photograph shows the community coming together to stand in solidarity with the missing victims. Source: Commons
Family members of the 43 kidnapped Mexican students gathered in front of Mexico’s Supreme Court to demand justice on the 6th anniversary of their loved ones’ mass abduction on September 26. On their way back from a protest in 2014, the students were all taken from the Ayotzinapa Rural College for Teachers in the state of Guerrero. After six years of falsified investigations due to government corruption, the case remains open.
The college held a history of participating in left-wing activism, with students regularly attending protests. The 43 young men traveled to Iguala, a nearby town, to participate in a demonstration against discriminatory hiring practices for teachers on September 26, 2014. On their way back, municipal police opened fire on their bus and claimed it had been hijacked by the students. However, surviving students revealed that the bus driver had agreed to take them back to campus.
Their participation in these protests angered Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca—possibly why the government targeted the students. After the students’ disappearance, Abarca and his wife fled the town only to be arrested in Mexico City on charges of links to organized crime.
The former government has been accused on multiple accounts of corruption and falsifying investigation reports to conceal military participation in the mass kidnapping.
The discredited report from the former government’s investigation concluded that corrupt police officers arrested the 43 students only to hand them over to a local gang, Guerreros Unidos. Some members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel confessed to killing and burning their bodies.
In his presidential campaign, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) promised to bring justice to the 43 students and their families. This promise led to the first government charges against the military and the police.
Mexican authorities issued 25 arrest warrants. Included within this list of suspects is a former director of the Criminal Investigation Agency, a former head of the federal police, and a prominent investigator of the kidnapping.
One of the most prominent suspects is Tomás Zerón, the chief of criminal investigations in the attorney general’s office under the prior administration. Zerón falsified accounts to cover up the truth of the mass abduction while stealing more than $40 million from the agency’s budget. The courts charged him and five other former officials with torture, forced disappearance, and judicial misconduct.
These arrests allowed AMLO the chance to shame his predecessor’s government while displaying his command over the military. To root out further corruption, he advocated for a national referendum on whether recent presidents should be prosecuted for alleged corruption. Mexico’s Supreme Court recently signed off on the referendum, which will be administered June 6, 2021.
AMLO depends heavily upon his control of the military; implicating soldiers for the mass abduction may therefore prove difficult for his administration. However, he has pledged to uncover the truth of what happened to the 43 victims.
Although private and government investigations have yet to implicate any suspects for the mass abduction, there is still a sense of hope among the community. Marco Cruz Flores, a classmate of the missing 43 students, remarked, “I know solving a case like this is not like curing a disease from one day to another, it will take time. But hope dies last, and we will be out on the streets until we know where they are.”