Mexican President Leaves Country as Announcement of Apparent Massacre of Students Deepens Political Crisis

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto departed for a previously scheduled trip to China this week, just days after his own attorney general announced that 43 students who disappeared more than a month ago in the state of Guerrero are now presumed dead — a decision critics say reflects a government dangerously out of step with a nation in crisis.

A Presidency Knocked Off Its Axis

The disappearance at the center of the crisis dates back to the night of September 26, when roughly 100 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College commandeered several buses in the city of Iguala, planning to travel to Mexico City for a demonstration marking the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. According to the government’s official account, local police in Iguala intercepted the students on orders from the city’s mayor, and after a violent confrontation that left six people dead, turned 43 surviving students over to a local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos.

Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam held a press conference on November 7, announcing that gang members in custody had confessed to killing the students and incinerating their remains at a municipal dump in the nearby town of Cocula, according to a detailed account from the Open Society Foundations. The announcement, rather than resolving the crisis, poured fuel on it. Families of the missing students, along with independent forensic experts, immediately raised doubts about the official account, and outrage over the government’s handling of the case — and its evident, longstanding entanglement with organized crime at the local level — spread rapidly across the country.

The Optics of a President’s Departure

It was against that backdrop that Peña Nieto boarded a plane for China days later, honoring a long-scheduled visit to attend an economic summit. According to reporting from the Committee on U.S./Latin American Relations, the president proceeded with the trip even as demonstrators back home set fire to the door of the National Palace in Mexico City — a scene that crystallized, for many critics, the sense of a government more focused on its international economic standing than on a domestic human rights catastrophe unfolding on its own soil.

The National Security Archive has since documented the Ayotzinapa case as one of the clearest examples of Peña Nieto’s original investigation proving “deeply inadequate and ultimately fraudulent” — a verdict that, at the time of the president’s departure for China, was only beginning to take shape publicly, but was already fueling a rapidly swelling protest movement.

A Nation in the Streets

That movement reached its most dramatic expression on November 20 — not coincidentally, the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution — when nearly 100,000 protesters marched toward Mexico City’s central Zócalo plaza in what became one of the largest demonstrations in the country’s modern history, according to Slate’s coverage of the protests. Hours later, protesters burned an effigy of Peña Nieto in a pointed, subversive reimagining of the traditional Easter “burning of Judas” ritual — an act organizers timed deliberately to follow the attorney general’s widely disbelieved account of the students’ fate.

The parallel to 1968 running through the protests is not incidental. The students had been traveling to Mexico City specifically to commemorate the Tlatelolco massacre, in which Mexican security forces killed as many as 350 student protesters shortly before Mexico City hosted the 1968 Olympics — an event that, like Ayotzinapa, has never seen anyone brought to justice. For many demonstrators, the echo between a security-force massacre of students in 1968 and a police-orchestrated disappearance of students in 2014 has made Ayotzinapa feel less like an isolated tragedy than confirmation of a pattern of state violence against Mexico’s student movements that spans generations.

What Comes Next

At least 80 suspects had been arrested in connection with the case by the time of the attorney general’s announcement, including 44 police officers, according to the Open Society Foundations report — evidence, prosecutors argued, of a swift and thorough response. But for families of the missing students and the independent forensic investigators working alongside them, arrests are not the same as answers. Only one of the 43 students has been positively identified from recovered remains, and serious questions about the official narrative — including an independent forensic team’s later conclusion that key elements of the government’s account were, in their words, “scientifically impossible” — would continue to dog the case for years after this initial announcement.

For now, the country watches a president who left for Beijing even as his own government’s account of a mass atrocity was collapsing in real time back home — a moment that, for many Mexicans in the streets, has come to symbolize a deeper crisis of trust between citizens and a state increasingly seen as entangled with the very violence it claims to be investigating.

For related coverage of political crises in Latin America, see our piece on Bolivia’s contested mining law, or browse our full International archive.