More than a decade after 43 students vanished in Mexico, ex-governor
arrested, accused of cover-up
[August 07, 2026]
By MARIA VERZA
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican authorities have arrested the former governor
of the southern state Guerrero for his alleged involvement in the
disappearance of 43 students in 2014, a case that has become a symbol
for impunity and state involvement in cartel violence.
Federal prosecutors said Thursday that they arrested Ángel 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, belonging to a party that gave rise to Mexico's
ruling Morena party, is the highest-profile arrest in the case to date
since the detention of former federal Attorney General Jesús 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 from the rural teacher’s college of
Ayotzinapa after they commandeered several buses on their way to a
protest shocked Mexico and the international community, and continues to
fuel outrage as the truth of the case continues to trickle out nearly 12
years later.
According to Mexican authorities, a cartel in Guerrero state's city of
Iguala attacked the students in collusion with security forces as well
as local, state and federal authorities, including the military.
Officials were presumably involved by taking part in the crime or
concealing it.
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.”
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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, File)
Hours later, the Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, which
represents the families, stated in a social media post that neither the
students’ parents nor their attorneys had been notified of the arrest
and that they were unaware of the charges. “If it is solid and in
accordance with the law, the process that is beginning could help settle
a debt of justice for the families,” the center said.
The current federal administration had committed to inform parents first
of any developments, a key demand from families for years.
Clemente Rodríguez, the father of one of the students, recalled that
from the beginning families asked for Aguirre to be investigated. “He
has to tell everything he knows,” he told The Associated Press.
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
buses to the U.S. operated by the local cartel in collusion with
authorities.
On Sept. 26, 2014, students were attacked in a coordinated manner at
various locations. In one instance, cameras recorded the moment when
security forces stopped one of the buses outside the Palace of Justice,
the seat of the courts, 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 Andrés Manuel López 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.
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