Mass kidnapping of Mexican students still unsolved 11 years later courthousenews com mass-kidnapping-of-mexican-students-still-unsolved-11-years-later William Savinar September 26 2025 An anti-monument dedicated to the 43 missing students on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City Sept 25 2025 William Savinar Courthouse News MEXICO CITY CN — It has been 11 years since 43 students at a rural teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa were forcibly disappeared on the night of Sept 26 2014 Years of independent and government reports show that police opened fire on the students after they commandeered buses to visit Mexico City for the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre — a nonviolent political tactic that had become a tradition in the state of Guerrero Police then handed the students over to the drug gang Guerreros Unidos Tomás Zerón former head of the Criminal Investigation Agency who oversaw the initial investigation and was deemed responsible for the government’s cover-up is a fugitive from justice who fled to Canada and then Israel in 2019 On Thursday Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stated her commitment to pressure Israel for Zerón’s extradition 1 2 To this day only three students’ remains have been identified Only during the last year were two people criminally convicted in connection with the students’ disappearance though they received lenient sentences through plea deals Adán Casarrubias Salgado one of the ex-leaders of the Guerreros Unidos was arrested in Mexico in 2015 on drug trafficking charges and extradited to the U S in 2022 In March a judge sentenced him to 11 years after he pleaded guilty to coordinating heroin shipments in secret compartments of busses from Mexico to Chicago and coordinating money deliveries in the Chicago area Pablo Vega Cuevas another key member of the Guerreros Unidos was arrested in 2014 on federal narcotics charges in Oklahoma He walked free in August after time served in pretrial detention as a result of his cooperation with a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into the Guerreros Unidos The two men were never questioned about the disappeared students even though DEA electronicintercepts — made public in full for the first time by the National Security Archive on Friday — show text messages between the two men reacting to the violence that night in Guerrero in real time indicating they could have key insight into the massacre “It’s hard to say from the outside what has been done in regards to these messages because there has been no concrete evidence to date that there has been a serious thorough and developed investigation into what kinds of evidence these intercepts could provide ” said Claire Dorfman assistant director of the National Security Archive’s Mexico Documentation Project She said the lack of thorough investigation is an example of prosecutorial tunnel vision “This case — and the Chicago side of this case — are an example of how drug prosecutions continue to trump human rights concerns ” she said “After 11 years with this case being so paradigmatic and so internationally recognized as a very serious and grave violation of human rights if the human rights concerns can’t trump the drug prosecutions then how can they ever ” said Dorfman “If protecting human rights and having accountability and having justice be a priority aren’t considered prosecutable even in a case like this then I don’t know when they ever could be ” 2 2