The state-sponsored crime against the students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College is an open wound that continues to fill us with outrage, anger, and helplessness. The disappearance of 43 teacher-training students and the murder of three others—as well as the murder of a player on the Avispones de Chilpancingo soccer team, the driver of the bus carrying the soccer team, and a woman traveling in a taxi that was passing through the area where the crime took place on September 26 and 27— in Iguala, Guerrero, is a crime that continues to cause pain. It is not merely a crime against those 49 people; it is a crime against their families, against society as a whole, and against humanity.
That crime evokes many feelings and questions: What has had to happen for us, 12 years later, to still not know exactly what happened on the night of September 26 and the early morning of September 27? How extensive is the pact of impunity that two presidents and one female president have been unwilling or unable to break? How much power do the perpetrators of this state-sponsored crime wield that they continue to be protected? Where are the missing young people? Why such cruelty toward them and their families?
If the Ayotzinapa case remains open, it is thanks to the tireless struggle that the families of the 43 students have waged for nearly 12 years. If it were up to those in power, an official “historical truth” would have been imposed long ago. But the parents of Ayotzinapa continue to march every month, attend conferences, and endure hunger, illness, and mistreatment. The families of Ayotzinapa have been affected emotionally, psychologically, physically, and financially. Twelve years later, the crime continues to take its toll: six fathers and two mothers have died while searching for their children; several officials who tried to get closer to the truth are practically in exile; people have been murdered to “cover up clues”…
In addition to these hardships, there are other strategies that also contribute to creating confusion and pushing us further and further away from the truth and justice, such as the report released last July by the National Human Rights Commission, which downplays the Federal Army’s responsibility and adds to the attacks on the progress of independent investigations. We must also mention the leaking of information to journalists with the aim of recycling “historical truths,” attempting to delegitimize the independent organizations that have collaborated on the case, or absolving the Army of all responsibility for the crime. The pens of power continue to operate as they did during the worst days of the PRI regime, when books or reports were published from the catacombs of the State.
We must also add the media campaigns aimed at criminalizing and stigmatizing the families and the teacher-training students. The attempt to divide the families. The repression and constant harassment by the police, which even claimed the life of Yanqui Kothan Gómez Peralta, a student at the rural teacher-training college, in 2024. To this list of atrocities we must add the large-scale police and military operations designed to prevent the teacher-training students and their families from entering Mexico City during the last World Cup.
With everything stacked against them, the parents of the missing students from Ayotzinapa have continued their struggle for 12 years—4,380 days searching for their children in every possible corner. In their search, they continue to denounce that “the federal government maintains a stance of cover-up and insists on protecting the Armed Forces.” They also demand “the immediate release of the more than 800 key military files and records generated by the Regional Intelligence Fusion Center (CRFI) in September 2014.”
In their search for their children, the families of Ayotzinapa offer a lesson in dignity and resilience similar to that provided by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, or by the women and relatives of victims of state terrorism in Mexico. With their tenacious and unwavering memory, with the pain of absence and the wear and tear of years of searching, the families of Ayotzinapa remind us that there can be no transformation while people remain disappeared, that there can be no change if impunity persists. Far from the rhetoric of those in power, the Mexico of the people continues to grieve and to pose a simple yet terrible question: Where are the 43 students from Ayotzinapa and the more than 135,000 people who have disappeared in this country?
It is September 26 once again, and every year it hurts more than it did back in 2014.
*Sociologist X: @RaulRomero_mx
Original text by Raúl Romero published by La Jornada on September 21st, 2026.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.