The FGR's arrest of ex-Governor Ángel Aguirre—accused of ordering footage of the Iguala bus destroyed—revives a case stalled for nearly 12 years.

This editorial originally appeared in the August 7, 2026 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left-wing daily newspaper.

The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) detained the former governor of Guerrero, Ángel Heladio Aguirre Rivero, as the party allegedly responsible for concealing evidence in the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students. According to the head of the FGR, Ernestina Godoy Ramos, in January and May of this year two protected witnesses confirmed the existence of recordings, and one of them stated that Aguirre ordered, “in a meeting with top-level officials of his government,” the destruction of all evidence of the moment when “the Estrella de Oro bus number 1531, in which a group of students was traveling, was recorded by security cameras numbers 12 and 15 outside the State Palace of Justice in Iguala” as it was stopped by municipal and state police. Godoy affirmed that the Attorney General’s Office “has evidence proving that this concealment instruction was issued directly by the then-governor, with the participation of high-level state public officials,” and that “far from being an isolated act or a technical omission, the concealment of the recordings was the result of a deliberate, malicious operation structured from the top of the state Executive Branch.”

Aguirre Rivero came to the governorship under the banner of the PRD in 2011, but did not finish his term because he was forced to resign a month after what happened in Iguala on the night of September 26–27, 2014. In 2022, the then-president of the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case, Alejandro Encinas, affirmed that the former state leader was among those responsible for implementing the so-called “historical truth,” the fabrication with which Enrique Peña Nieto’s government tried to close the case and which was refuted by forensic data and revelations of evidence-planting by Tomás Zerón. The latter, who headed the Criminal Investigation Agency, is a fugitive under the protection of the Israeli regime.

This detention is cause for satisfaction insofar as it opens a new hope of advancing in a case stalled by an exasperating series of difficulties. It must be recalled that, in the first days after the young men’s disappearance, the federal authorities resisted acknowledging the events and ordering an investigation, thereby giving more than enough time for the material perpetrators to cover up their acts. When the now-defunct Office of the Attorney General (PGR) finally took over the case, it was evident that its interest was not to solve it, but to limit the political damage of what quickly became the most emblematic episode of human rights violations on a national scale in decades.

The authorities’ negligence and malpractice sabotaged the investigation in several ways; for example, the torture inflicted on several defendants was considered grounds for releasing them. The then-president of the Superior Court of Justice of Guerrero, Lambertina Galeana Marín, is detained for the destruction of evidence. Moreover, the testimonies of the hitmen and ringleaders who have been or remain detained clash with one another, as they blame each other. Until now, there is not enough documentary evidence to overcome this situation, in which the events are reconstructed from the word of some criminals against that of others.

In the nearly 12 years since the tragedy, more than 20 alleged participants have died, including one of the top leaders of the criminal group Guerreros Unidos, principally responsible for the students’ disappearance. At this moment, the main questions that must be answered are whom and why former governor Aguirre was covering for when he asked that the recordings be handed over and ordered their destruction. The answers to these questions could shed light on the people who ordered and carried out the young men’s disappearance and lead to clarifying their whereabouts, the central demand of the families and of Mexican society.

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