A decade after 43 students vanished in Mexico, ex-governor arrested, accused of concealing evidence

A protestor holds a portrait of Angel Aguirre, the former governor of Guerrero state, with the Spanish word for assassin written across it, during a march against the disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers' college, Jan. 26, 2015, in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities have detained the former governor of the southern state Guerrero for his alleged involvement in the disappearance of 43 students in 2014 -- a case that has grown to become a symbol for impunity and state involvement in cartel violence.

Federal prosecutors said Thursday that they arrested Angel Aguirre, Guerrero’s former governor, on accusations of “concealing evidence to determine the whereabouts of the students” of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.

The former governor -- of the party from which Mexico’s ruling Morena party emerged -- is one of the highest-profile arrests in the case to date since the detention of former federal Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam, who is facing criminal charges of forced disappearance, obstruction of justice and torture. Aguirre governed Guerrero from 2011 until he resigned in October 2014, one month after the students disappeared.

The disappearance of the students after they commandeered several buses on their way to a protest shocked Mexico and the international community, and continues to fuel outrage in Mexico as the truth of the case continues to trickle out more than 10 years later.

Ernestina Godoy, the Attorney General of Mexico, stated that two testimonies gathered this year indicate that Aguirre not only requested that officials hand over the security camera footage from one of the locations of the attack that night but also ordered the destruction of any evidence related to the events.

“The Attorney General’s Office has evidence proving that this order to conceal the evidence was issued directly by the then-governor, with the participation of high-level state officials,” she said.

“Far from being an isolated act or a technical oversight, the concealment of the recordings was the result of a malicious operation, deliberately orchestrated from the highest levels of the State Executive Branch.”

Godoy did not explain why the testimonies of a collaborator and a protected witness, collected in January and May 2016 respectively, were obtained more than a decade after the events. She only indicated that when she arrived at the Attorney General’s Office at the end of last year, she began a “reanalysis” of the case with a “new investigative approach.”

After three administrations, dozens of arrests and an investigation plagued by irregularities, key questions remain unanswered. Authorities believe the students were killed, but only bone fragments from three of them have been found, and the motive for the attack remains unclear, although it is believed to have been linked to heroin trafficking in the area.

According to Mexican authorities, a cartel in the city of Iguala attacked the students in multiple locations in collusion with security forces and local, state and federal authorities, including the military.

In one of these locations, outside the Palace of Justice -- the seat of the courts -- there were cameras that recorded the moment when security forces stopped one of the buses, but initial official statements claimed that this footage did not exist. Now, the federal prosecutor’s office confirms what investigators from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) denounced years ago: that these recordings were hidden or destroyed to conceal evidence.

The administration of former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who served from 2018 to 2024, described the Ayotzinapa case as a “state crime.”

During President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, which began in October 2024, the president said that new lines of investigation were reopened, some of which, according to the prosecutor, have led to the arrest of the former governor.

The Associated Press