On Sep. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, 43 students from the nearby Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' School were disappeared by security forces working with a drug cartel. This tragic episode is one of the darkest known in recent Mexican history.
Since that night, I have witnessed the unwavering hope, dignity, and determination of the students’ families. Their relentless pursuit of truth and justice, alongside the creativity and vision of their lawyers, have kept national and international pressure on this case. Each successive governmental administration has committed to resolve the case, only to later fall short.
After the disappearance, the families and lawyers did something unprecedented. They requested that the government of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto invite an Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) to provide technical assistance and conduct an independent review of the government’s investigation. These international experts unraveled the false narrative that the government had created in an attempt to neatly explain and close the case. Their work showed that responsibility for the disappearances went well beyond municipal police and cartel members: State and federal authorities also played a role. Peña Nieto’s defense secretary never allowed the experts to question members of the Army during their investigation. In 2016, the government, uncomfortable with the GIEI’s reports and press conferences, unceremoniously ejected them from the country.
In 2018, the Ayotzinapa families convinced the new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to take on their case as a central human rights commitment of his government. This led to the creation of a truth commission, an investigative unit for the case within the Attorney General’s Office, and the return of the international experts to find answers.
I joined this unit as the Special Prosecutor, and with the support of the truth commission and the president himself, we made significant progress. We obtained arrest warrants against organized crime members and government authorities at all levels, including the military, as well as warrants against federal police, prosecutors, and high-ranking federal officials who had participated in a cover-up of the case by manipulating crime scenes and torturing suspects. Five years after the disappearances, the state was finally investigating itself.
We managed to locate and identify the remains of two students: Christian Rodríguez Telumbre and Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz. This generated new hope of finding the other ones.
We also worked with U.S. Department of Justice authorities in Chicago, who agreed to share thousands of messages obtained through wiretaps that clearly narrated the network of complicity between the Mexican government, including the military, and organized crime, to traffic drugs between Mexico and the United States.
Nevertheless, from my perspective, the investigation uncovered so much evidence of the collusion between authorities —including soldiers— and organized crime that there was internal pressure to stop it. On the eve of September 2022, the government resolved to “make an important step forward” in the case. Political urgency to provide a new story to the families and Mexican society about what happened to the 43 students once again overcame the requirements of a solid legal investigation.
The state's effort to investigate and prosecute itself bent under political pressure. As prosecutor, I refused to support the new narrative and cave in to external pressures on the investigation, so I resigned. In the following months, the GIEI experts also stepped away, signaling that the conditions in which they restarted work with the López Obrador administration in 2019 no longer existed.
Faced with a challenge to his new narrative, the president began to use his daily morning press conference to shift attention away from central aspects of the case.
Denigrating the families’ demands for truth and justice by making up narratives about what happened to their children is without a doubt the most serious mistake of the last ten years. Two federal administrations have now reneged on their promises to investigate the truth and sanction those responsible. Despite the numerous arrests and indictments in the Ayotzinapa case —truly exceptional for disappearance cases in Mexico— the government has failed, even in this paradigmatic case, to put itself truly on the side of the victims, instead betting on the side of power, opacity, impunity, and corruption.
As President Claudia Sheinbaum takes office on October 1, there are around 116,000 disappeared people in Mexico. Disappearances continue, impunity remains the norm, and the policy designed in 2018 to search for disappeared persons has deteriorated to the point where it no longer exists. How Sheinbaum responds to this crisis will reveal the extent to which her government will prioritize human rights.
Those who have walked alongside families of the disappeared have learned from their great dignity and courage. Despite relentless attacks, they have refused to give up. They continue to hope, to demand truth, and to remind us all that justice is not negotiable.
Omar Gómez Trejo is the former Special Prosecutor for the Ayotzinapa case.
