Iguala mass kidnapping

On the night of September 26, 2014, more than 100 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Tixtla, Guerrero, traveled to Iguala to commandeer buses for a planned march in Mexico City commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Municipal police from Iguala, reportedly acting on orders from the mayor, intercepted the students, set up roadblocks, and opened fire on their buses. Two students were killed during the initial clash, and in a related incident gunmen fired on a bus carrying a local soccer team, killing the driver, a player, and a bystander. The next morning, the body of student Julio César Mondragón was found; he had been tortured before dying of brain injuries. In total, six people were killed and 25 wounded that night.

Eyewitnesses said students were rounded up and forced into police vehicles, taken to the Iguala police station, and then handed to police in Cocula. According to investigators, the students were subsequently handed over, while still alive, to members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, which had splintered from the Beltrán Leyva organization. Investigators concluded that cartel members transported the students to a dump outside Cocula, where some died of suffocation and others were killed, their bodies allegedly burned and remains disposed of in a nearby river. The remaining 43 of an initial 57 reported missing were never found alive.

An initial federal investigation under Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, known as the "historic truth," concluded that corrupt local police, acting on orders of Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez, had turned the students over to Guerreros Unidos, who killed them and destroyed the remains, and that federal police and the military played no role. This account was disputed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which called it "scientifically impossible," and by journalist Anabel Hernández, who alleged the Mexican Army was involved in intercepting drugs the students had unknowingly transported, with the students killed to eliminate witnesses. Skepticism also centered on evidence such as rainfall the night of the alleged fire and a lack of expected physical trace at the dump site.

Following the 2018 election of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a new "truth commission" investigation was launched, leading to the arrest of a dozen soldiers and a former attorney general, though the army and navy were reported to continue withholding information. In February 2024, parents of the missing students announced they would suspend dialogue with the commission. As of early 2024, those incarcerated in connection with the case included Guerreros Unidos leader José Ángel Casarrubias Salgado ("El Mochomo"), sentenced to life in prison in the United States, and former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, held under house arrest in Mexico City. Mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, were accused by authorities of masterminding the abduction but were not put on trial for the students' disappearance. As of 2025, only the remains of three students—Alexander Mora Venancio, Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, and Christian Alfonso Rodríguez Telumbre—have been forensically identified and their deaths confirmed.