Last week, Mexico's Attorney General's Office executed an arrest warrant against Ángel Helodio Aguirre Rivero, the former governor of Guerrero, for his alleged responsibility in the disappearance of 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero.
According to Attorney General Ernestina Godoy Ramos, the loss of video from two surveillance cameras at the Iguala Palace of Justice, which recorded the detention of one of the buses carrying the students on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, was not a technical failure but a "malicious and deliberately structured" operation carried out at the highest levels of the state government.
The disappearance of the 43 students from Guerrero has remained under intense public and media scrutiny for more than a decade.
As noted by Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), between 80 and 100 students were traveling to Mexico City to take part in the annual march commemorating the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. On the night of Sept. 26, the buses carrying the students were intercepted by municipal police officers in Iguala, who blocked their path.
When the students got off the buses to move the patrol vehicles, officers opened fire. According to the CNDH, three students and three bystanders were killed during the attack, while another group of students was detained, forced into pickup trucks and subsequently disappeared.
In the early hours of Sept. 27, another group of students making their way back to Ayotzinapa was intercepted by police, who illegally detained several of them before forcing them into vehicles and making them disappear as well.
As noted by Animal Político, during the first years of the investigation, state authorities maintained that the footage from cameras 12 and 15, which captured the exact moment municipal and state police intercepted one of the buses, either did not exist or had been lost due to technical failures in the storage system.
At the time, Lambertina Galeana Marín was president of the Guerrero Superior Court of Justice. The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), which was formed to investigate the students' disappearance, reported that Galeana Marín ordered the footage deleted rather than providing the evidence to authorities. It was also reported that Galeana Marín had secured the presidency of the court with the support of Aguirre Rivero, who allegedly instructed her to have the footage deleted.
Ángela Buitrago Ruiz, a former member of the GIEI, said in an interview with Animal Político that the images captured by the cameras showed one of the buses carrying between 15 and 17 of the missing students. According to the lawyer, preserving the footage "would have allowed authorities from day one to understand which authorities were colluding and which authorities had carried out the detention and disappearance."
In her statement about Aguirre Rivero's arrest, Godoy said the case against the former governor was strengthened by two key testimonies collected by authorities in early 2026.
In January, a protected witness told federal prosecutors that the recordings existed, directly identified the person who removed the discs and described how they were personally handed over to Aguirre Rivero.
A few months later, in May, a second protected witness told authorities that the former governor called an emergency meeting with his cabinet to order the destruction of any evidence linking state forces to the events that took place on the night of Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala.
