Ten years after the kidnapping of Mexican students, parents still don’t know where their children are

MEXICO CITY (OSV News) – Cristina Bautista never stopped searching for her son, who was among 43 students who disappeared in a 2014 attack that was never solved. She looks for two simple reasons: no one else will do it, and government investigations repeatedly hit roadblocks – often due to a lack of political will.

“These ten years have been a simulation of searching for our children,” Bautista told OSV News. “If it were real, our children would not be absent these ten years. It is not knowing anything about our children.”

The September 26, 2014, attack on students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a rural teacher training college for young men, shocked Mexico, which had apparently grown accustomed to horrific stories of drug cartel violence. Ten years later, impunity remains despite widespread social outrage, parental searches, and Mexican and international investigations.

Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School is part of a network of teacher training colleges established decades ago to bring education to rural areas. Over time, the schools have become closely involved in social issues.

The night the students disappeared who had commandeered buses in the city of Iguala – located 300 kilometers south of Mexico City in the country’s heroin-producing heartland – and were planning to travel to the capital for an annual protest against a previous atrocity: the 1968 attack on students on the eve of the Summer Olympics, according to a government truth commission and international research. But their buses were attacked by police, who handed the students over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The anniversary was a harsh reminder of the power and impunity of drug cartels, along with the collusion of politicians and police with criminal groups. It also showed the lack of political will to solve one of the country’s most notorious crimes. For the parents of the missing students, there is only one question.

“What happened to our children?” Bautista said. “That’s what we want to know.”

The first news of the attack brought Mexicans from all socio-economic classes onto the streets in protest, shouting: “It was the state” and “They were taken alive, we want them back alive.”

They also protested the initial government investigation, which stated that the students had been kidnapped and taken to a garbage dump, where their bodies were burned in an inferno. It is a version of events that then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam called “The Historical Truth.”

The investigation under President Enrique Peña Nieto, who left office in 2018, was largely based on the torture of suspects, according to outside investigators. The army also did not cooperate.

However, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised to revive the case. He had a personal meeting with the parents of the 43 students during his successful 2018 campaign where, Bautista recalled, “he promised to clarify the matter (and) we had confidence and hope in him that we would find out the truth .”

López Obrador formed a truth commission shortly after taking office in December 2018. He also appointed a special prosecutor and international investigators were also invited to return.

“There was a clear political will,” said Santiago Aguirre, director of the Jesuit-sponsored Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center in Mexico City. “There was progress.”

The truth commission released a report in 2022 calling the attacks “a state crime.” It was also discovered that the students had been followed by police and military from the moment they left Ayotzinapa school – some 120 kilometers south of Iguala – and during the attack, but they did not intervene. The committee did not know the whereabouts of the students, but considered it unlikely that they were still alive.

At least 80 arrest warrants were subsequently issued and Murillo Karam was arrested on charges of torture and enforced disappearance – charges he denies.

But the case subsequently stalled and the special prosecutor suddenly resigned. Lawyers for the families argued the investigation clashed with the Mexican military, which has become one of the president’s key allies during his time in office.

Ayotzinapa’s independent prosecutor “found evidence of the level of corruption in the Mexican authorities and in particular of the links between parts of the military and drug traffickers,” Aguirre told OSV News. “We at the Centro Pro believe that, given the choice of supporting the victims or remaining with the military, the President and the government have chosen the latter and that explains why the case has not been resolved.”

International investigators, meanwhile, claim the military ignored presidential orders to open its archives. They left the country in 2023 saying: “It is impossible to move on.”

López Obrador insisted: “There is no impunity,” saying the case has made progress thanks to the armed forces.

The president later targeted lawyers for the students’ families, including Centro Pro, a human rights organization. He verbally attacked Centro Pro several times during his morning press conference, claiming it was “not what it was before” – referring to Centro Pro’s long history of counseling victims of violence and confronting state actors such as the military.

He also stressed that the Ayotzinapa families “are being manipulated by conservative groups of the right, backed by foreign governments that want to harm us politically.” He made the comments in March 2024, resorting to his usual word for perceived opponents: “conservative.”

“This is undoubtedly due to the fact that we have not remained silent in our comments on the continued impunity, violence and cover-up by the military,” Centro Pro said in a response to López Obrador in December 2023. “Our work, together with other respected civil society organizations, is to defend the interests and rights of families, with victims at the center.”

Parents of the missing students supported their representatives after the president’s attacks, including Centro Pro.

“Thanks to them, the government cannot deceive us and cannot deliver a body that is not one of our children,” Bautista said.

López Obrador will leave office on September 30 with an approval rating above 70%, according to some polls. His popularity and repeated attacks on parents’ representatives have reduced some of the support he had received until 2022, according to observers.

The president has said he hopes his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, will continue the investigation.

“I promised them to look for them until we found the young people, we have been working on that all the time, we have not progressed as we would have liked, but it is not a closed case,” he said in a September message 2011. 25 letter to the families.

The families have repeatedly expressed their disappointment with López Obrador, saying in a July letter: “You have lied to us, you have deceived and betrayed us.”

Bautista, meanwhile, vowed to find out her son’s whereabouts.

“I will continue searching as long as God lets me live,” she said. “I’ll continue here.”

David Agren writes for OSV News from Mexico City.