Eight years ago, 43 Mexican students vanished. Now, the plot thickens further

Ravaged by a violent land-and-power war between drug cartels, Mexico is close to hitting the tragic milestone of 100,000 people officially registered missing or forcibly disappeared – figures that, together with the narco war itself, have been increasing daily since 1964, according to official data. Among this long list of civilians are 43 college students who disappeared in 2014 in the Mexican state of Guerrero, earning them the moniker the “43 from Ayotzinapa,” after the all-male Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College where they studied.

The shocking case has become one of the most controversial criminal and political soap operas in Mexico’s history.

And new chapters are still being written in 2022.

In the last few weeks, new revelations from the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) – created in 2014 in a deal between the Mexican State and the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights to ensure independence – have served as the basis for accusation against the Mexican government of falsifying investigations into the 43 from Ayotzinapa. 

In late September 2014, the group traveled by bus to attend small protests against what they saw as discriminatory hiring procedures affecting rural educators. On their way back, local police agents opened fire on the bus, killing at least six people. The rest of the story – and the whereabouts of the others – is opaque.

And according to the new GIEI report, an entire sequence of illegal procedures ensued. The document alleges that the Mexican military...