Federal prosecutors 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.
Aguirre — who has previously denied wrongdoing — was arrested on charges of obstruction of justice and forced disappearance, Attorney General Ernestina Godoy told reporters.
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 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.
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 video 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.
Godoy went further in her accusations.
“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.”
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 arrest comes after years of calls for justice.
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.
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.
Godoy said new testimony from two people in January and May, one a protected witness, helped establish that Aguirre may have ordered the destruction of evidence related to the night of the students’ disappearance in a meeting with senior officials in his administration.
Angela Buitrago, a member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts, an independent international rights team that has investigated the case, said her team had opened the line of investigation into Aguirre in 2015. She said the latest information reinforced the team’s conclusion that the state was responsible, and had the footage Aguirre reportedly ordered to be destroyed come to light sooner, it could have helped find the students. “It is a state crime, regardless of whether it was committed by state or federal authorities,” she said.
In the viral moment that set the entire case in motion,
the students — all young men — disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, on September 26, 2014, after the bus on which they were traveling to Mexico City was stopped by municipal and state police. Police allegedly handed the students over to members of Guerreros Unidos, a crime gang.
International probes have determined that the students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College were killed by organized crime members in cahoots with police while they were on their way to a protest in Mexico City. The remains of three victims have since been positively identified, but the others have yet to be found.
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.
