10 Years Later, Where are the Remaining 40?

The 43 students “disappeared” in Iguala on September 26, 2014. A few weeks later, on October 5, a mass grave was found outside Iguala. It contained the remains of 34 people. 

None of the remains matched any of the 43 students.

On December 14, 2014. forensic experts at the University of Innsbruck determined the remains of a body matched one of the students, Alexander Mora.  At a protest soon after Mora’s remains were confirmed, the father of one of the missing students had declared, “We will not sit down and cry. We will continue in our struggle to bring back alive the 42.”  

The remains of a second student, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, were confirmed on September 16, 2015.

No other students—alive or dead—were confirmed until July 2020, when an anonymous tip led investigators to a body near a garbage dump in Coculo, a town near Iguala. Investigators matched the remains they found to a third student, Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre.

The fate of the 40 remaining students remains a grim mystery.  State and federal investigations into the “43” atrocity have been severely criticized and discredited. Those early investigations accused a local drug gang of kidnapping and executing the students, burning their bodies at a local landfill, and dumping the remains in a nearby river.  

However, in 2015, an independent investigation concluded the Mexican government’s findings were a fiction.  That panel concluded that state and federal police had worked with municipal police to kill and kidnap the students.  The investigators also confirmed that federal authorities working the case had tortured most of the arrested suspects to extract confessions.

Over the course of years of protests, Mexican citizens have demanded that the kidnapped students be returned alive.  Such a wish grows less likely with each passing day. Instead, parents are left to mourn their missing sons, stolen from them by a political leaders and police officers who continue to act with impunity, violence, and terror.