Opinion Nine years later, a dark chapter in Mexico remains murky

By the Editorial Board
July 30, 2023 at 6:45 a.m. EDT



Family members of 43 missing students from a teachers college in southern Mexico carry pictures of their loved ones during a 2016 demonstration demanding a more thorough investigation of the mass disappearance. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)



When Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador entered office five years ago, he promised to search unceasingly for the truth about 43 students who disappeared in September 2014 in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero. Now, a team of international investigators is departing Mexico, complaining it was stonewalled by the armed forces. It is a mark of failure for Mr. López Obrador and a sad comment on Mexico’s inability to extricate itself from lawlessness and impunity.

The students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ School commandeered buses on Sept. 26, 2014. They planned to drive to a protest in Mexico City. The unarmed students were attacked in the city of Iguala by local police and gunmen working for a drug cartel, according to previous reports by investigators. Unbeknownst to the students, the buses might have held drugs or other contraband from the cartel. Six people were killed and dozens wounded in the attack. Police captured the 43 students — and they were never seen again. Remains of three bodies have been found. No one has been convicted in the case.

Mexico has long suffered without rule of law, been plagued by drug cartel violence and struggled with forced disappearances — upward of 100,000 of them. The plight of the 43 students has become a symbol of the government’s inability to hold to account those responsible for misdeeds. The abduction came during the term of President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose administration was accused by investigators of staging an elaborate coverup of a crime that involved both a drug gang and security forces at the local, state and federal levels.

Mr. López Obrador has taken some steps to deal with Mexico’s crisis of the disappeared. He established a truth commission on the Ayotzinapa case; he created another commission into disappearances during the Cold War era, when the military and the police detained hundreds of suspected leftists in the Dirty War; and he gave a big boost, in staffing and money, to the National Search Commission, created under Mr. Peña Nieto to search for all the disappeared, from the 1960s onward.

But Mr. López Obrador did not force the military to hand over information to the international experts investigating Ayotzinapa. He stood by as security forces bugged the phones of top officials on the Ayotzinapa and Dirty War inquiries. Mr. López Obrador has increasingly relied upon the military, expanding its budget and responsibilities while brushing aside many allegations of abuses. The military has denied it was responsible for the disappearance of the 43 students. The president has also refused in recent years to meet with the mothers of the disappeared, who have been the driving force behind the hunt for the missing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/30/missing-mexico-students-mystery/