MEXICO CITY — For more than a decade, the question has haunted Mexico: What happened to the 43 rural college students who were taken into police custody in September 2014 — and then vanished?
The mystery, which revealed the complicity of the state in the country’s ongoing crisis of forced disappearances, has evaded elucidation ever since, sparking regular protests by the students’ loved ones and allegations of a state coverup.
But now, 12 years after the disappearance of the teacher’s college students in Guerrero state, and following a lengthy reexamination of the evidence ordered by President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexican federal officials announced this week that they believe they’re closer to cracking the case.
“It’s been an open wound for all Mexico,” Sheinbaum told reporters Monday. “But sometimes, these processes move at their own pace.”
Authorities say new evidence points to the involvement of a family that owned two funeral homes in Iguala, Guerrero, where the students were last seen, and worked as government contractors at the local medical examiner’s office.
Phone records show that members of a local cartel, Guerreros Unidos, placed calls to Rodolfo Rueda Sebastián, the owner of the two funeral parlors, on the night of the disappearance, authorities said. Repeated searches of his funeral establishments, El Ángel and Económicos Rueda, have revealed what investigators described this week as “serious irregularities.”
“We found unregistered skeletal remains, bodies with duplicate files, and remains with dates that reference back to 2014,” said Mauricio Pazarán, who is directing the federal investigation. “In a mattress found at the rear of the [medical examiner’s office], charred skeletal remains and dental fragments were discovered.”
The funeral parlors’ owner, three family members and several state employees were arrested and jailed late last year in connection with the case and charged with forced disappearance.
The accused have not responded publicly to the charges. The Washington Post was unable to identify any lawyers representing them. The funeral parlors didn’t return requests for comment.
Family members of the accused denied wrongdoing in a statement on social media in June and a public protest in July. A daughter of the funeral parlor owner called on Sheinbaum to present evidence of any crime.
“Since October 2025 we have lived through hell,” daughters of the funeral parlor owner said in their statement. “Every day we face uncertainty about why we’re in this situation. …
“They are taking innocent people and leaving a family without a father, without a mother and without siblings.”
The investigation is one of the most visible ways the Sheinbaum administration has tried to address the crisis of Mexico’s disappeared. One of Sheinbaum’s predecessors, Felipe Calderón, with the support of the United States, militarized the fight against the country’s drug cartels two decades ago. Since then, more than 130,000 people have vanished.
In April, the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances called the situation a “crime against humanity” and asked that the U.N. General Assembly consider preventive measures.
More than 4,500 clandestine grave sites have been found across the country, the committee reported, and 72,000 human remains are unidentified.
”Multiple widespread or systematic attacks against the civilian population have taken place at different moments and in different parts of the country,” the committee said.
The developments announced this week have helped fill gaps in at least one of those cases.
“This is a line of investigation that continues,” Sheinbaum said. “These are scientific facts.”
In September 2014, dozens of students aged 15 to 25 traveled from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School to Iguala. They planned to commandeer buses there to take to Mexico City for the annual demonstration commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, when state security forces shot down unarmed student protesters.
Roughly 80 students departed Iguala’s bus station. A squad of municipal police officers, allegedly in collusion with Guerreros Unidos, opened fire. Six people were killed and more than a dozen wounded.
Some students fled. Forty-three were detained by police and haven’t been seen since. The motivation for the attack remains unclear.
As the disappearances became international news, then-president Enrique Peña Nieto ordered a federal investigation. His administration eventually presented what officials called the “historical truth”: Iguala municipal police had handed the students over to Guerreros Unidos, they said. The cartel killed them, incinerated their bodies and then dumped the remains into the San Juan River.
International investigators disproved key elements of the government’s case, deepening suspicion that federal officials had been involved in the disappearance and a subsequent coverup. In 2022, the administration of Peña Nieto’s successor, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, determined that the disappearances constituted a “state crime.”
Authorities over the years have arrested several government officials, soldiers and police in the case, including former Mexican attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam in 2022 and former Guerrero state governor Ángel Aguirre. But they have not secured any convictions.
Sheinbaum, who succeeded López Obrador in 2024, said government investigators would apply new methods of analysis to the case file in a renewed push to solve the case.
“What happened that night and early morning?” she asked in March 2025. “Who knows who participated?”
The new analysis has yielded results, authorities said this week, and they’re closing in on answers.
“The case will not be closed until the truth is found, justice is done, and we find where these young people are,” Sheinbaum said.
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