Mexican Teachers and the State

Abstract

In August 2022, Mexican authorities acknowledged what activists had been claiming for years: that the 43 normal school students who had gone missing in the southern state of Guerrero on September 26, 2014, were forcibly disappeared by the state. In this, they confirmed the words of the popular chant, “Fue el estado.” It took federal authorities eight years to admit what the victims’ families and journalists had long argued, namely that drug traffickers, along with elements of the Mexican military and other federal officials, conspired in the disappearance and subsequent coverup of what came to be known as “Ayotzinapa’s Missing 43.”