By John Gibler
Abstract: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did not fulfill his promises to quell the devastating violence linked to the transnational illegal drug trade, return the army to its barracks, or find 43 Ayotzinapa students who were disappeared in 2014. His failure to fulfill all three of these promises is structurally linked and provides the most compelling lens through which to view his term in office. López Obrador’s government sabotaged its own Ayotzinapa investigation, increased military power and presence in Mexico's everyday life, and consolidated the power of his political party, Morena.
Like any politician, outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a lot of promises on the campaign trail. He famously promised to use “hugs not bullets” to quell the devastating violence linked to the transnational illegal drug trade. He promised to return the army to its barracks. And he promised to find the 43 disappeared college students, uncover the truth about what happened to them in September 2014, and bring those responsible to justice.
His failure to fulfill all three of these particular promises is structurally linked and provides the most compelling lens through which to view his term in office.
López Obrador did in fact dispatch countless hugs, at least one infamous handshake, and often defended his strategy, claiming, for example, that some 70,000 fentanyl overdose deaths in the US stemmed from parents not hugging their kids enough.
Predictably, all this hugging did nothing to stem the violence plaguing the country. During López Obrador’s first five years in office, 171,085 people were murdered, already making his the most violent presidential term in Mexican history. Also, during his six-year term, more than 50,000 people were disappeared (His government caused an outcry by trying to reduce the official number of the disappeared prior to the 2024 elections).
Instead of “hugs not bullets,” López Obrador’s term was marked by hugs and bullets. He did not return the army to its barracks, but instead increased its budget, faculties, power, and involvement in civic life more than any president before him.
Militarization in Mexico did not start with López Obrador, of course. The army was involved in acts of state terrorism in the 1960s and 1970s. Early links between the army, counterinsurgency, and drug trafficking date back to this time. After the Zapatista uprising on January 1, 1994 and guerrilla actions carried out in southern states like Guerrero in 1996, the government sent tens of thousands of troops into those states. Military involvement in civilian life during those years was mostly carried out under the logic of counterinsurgency and the repression of political opposition.
Since President Felipe Calderón launched the so-called drug war in December 2006, however, militarization has expanded far beyond the counterinsurgency actions of the previous decades. In 2021, a Mexican research institute documented 246 civilian functions that had been transferred to the army between 2006 and 2021. Another Mexican research institute reported that, by 2023, the number of civilian functions and funding items transferred to the military had reached 291.
During this same period of time - concurrent to the increase in military power and involvement in civilian life - drug trafficking, all manner of organized crime (extorsion, human trafficking, human smuggling, kidnapping, illegal mining, siphoning from national gas pipes), and the forms of violence inherent to these activities (murder, public displays of mutilated bodies, forced disappearance) skyrocketed to unprecedented levels.
US funding, training, and equipment for the Mexican military (and federal police) also increased and expanded during the first twelve years of the so-called drug war (2006-2018). These years also saw the increase in Central American migration through Mexico to the United States, the systematic preying upon those migrants by Mexican state and non-state armed groups, and the increased pressure by the United States government for Mexico to militarize its southern border to stem the flow of migrants.
López Obrador is the author of the most staggering of these power transfers to the military. Under his administration, the army was granted control over customs, migration, ports, several airports, an airline, the Maya Train project in the Yucatán Peninsula, the national system for science, technology, and humanities funding, the Mexican version of a food and drug administration, and, perhaps most controversially (the Supreme Court ruled against it), the newly created federal police force, misleadingly dubbed the National Guard.
López Obrador’s administration thus oversaw the simultaneous increase in militarization and increase in organized crime and violence, while it stunted the trend of increased US involvement with Mexico’s military under the pretext of the “drug war.” When US authorities arrested former Mexican national defense secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos at the Los Angeles International Airport on drug trafficking charges, López Obrador reportedly threatened to expel DEA agents from Mexico and cut off all cooperation. This prompted an unprecedented reversal: US authorities released Cienfuegos and sent him home where he was promptly exonerated (Cienfuegos was Mexico´s national defense secretary when the Ayotzinapa students were disappeared and lied repeatedly about the army’s role in the attacks, disappearance, and cover-up).
The Supreme Court has blocked several of López Obrador’s proposals. That may not be a problem for his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. His party, which controls the Mexican congress, just approved a contentious law to rewrite the constitution to require the direct election of federal judges, including Supreme Court justices.
López Obrador is unabashed about his support for the military: it would be impossible for him to be otherwise given his actions in office. As he does with every criticism he receives, López Obrador claims that the critics of militarization are simply his “conservative opponents” and that rather than militarize the country, “what is becoming clear is that the soldiers are the people in uniform, loyal workers and patriots. For this reason, I exclaim: Long live the army! Long live Mexico!”
Keeping this exclamation in mind, let’s turn to López Obrador’s promise to find the 43 disappeared students, uncover the truth about what happened to them, and bring those responsible to justice.
On the night of September 26-27, 2014, in and around Iguala, Guerrero, hundreds of municipal, state, and federal police, together with soldiers from the Mexican army and civilian members of the transnational illegal heroin export company known as Guerreros Unidos (a play on the name of their home state of Guerrero, which is both a common last name and means “warrior”) collaborated for an attack. This assault involved attacking five commercial buses commandeered by nearly a hundred students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, one bus—by mistake—carrying a youth soccer team from the state capital, Chilpancingo, as well as several taxis on the road at the time. The attackers killed six people—three Ayotzinapa students, a bus driver, a teenage soccer player, and a taxi passenger—critically wounded scores, and forcibly disappeared 43 Ayotzinapa students.
The attacks led to widespread outcry in Mexico and across the world. From the very beginning, the Mexican government lied about the attacks. That night, the mayor of Iguala told reporters that nothing was happening: “Iguala is at peace.” Three days later he and his wife went into hiding. The Guerrero state government tortured a few low-level employees of Guerreros Unidos into leading them to a mass grave site filled with twenty-eight semi-charred human remains. The federal government took over the investigation and claimed that the remains belonged to the students. Weeks later, the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropologists analyzed the DNA of the remains, showing that they did not in fact belong to any of the disappeared students.
After this early failure to close the case, the federal government launched a ridiculous theory that, during the predawn hours of September 27, 2014, a handful of Guerreros Unidos gunmen murdered the 43 students, incinerated their bodies in an open-air trash dump during a rain storm, gathered the smoking ash of their bones into plastic bags around three or five o’clock that afternoon, and emptied them into the nearby San Juan river. They also conveniently left only one bag with a single uncharred bone fragment next to the biggest tree on the bank of the river. The federal attorney general at the time, Jesus Murillo Karam, christened this absurd fiction as “the historical truth” of what happened to the students.
“The historical truth” was promptly dismembered and discredited by multiple investigative reports produced by an Interdisciplinary Group of International Experts (GIEI) invited by the families of the disappeared and the Mexican government to assist in the investigation, as well as by the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropologists. Not to mention the Cocula trash dump workers who went to work that day, dumped the trash around noon or a little thereafter and failed to run into anyone, much less crazed and insomniac killers throwing the last logs onto an improvised, outdoor incineration pile.
After the GIEI published its scathing second report, Enrique Peña Nieto’s government disinvited the group to assist in the investigation and dedicated the final two years of its term to repeating the same lies. This is the context—four years of official lies and impunity that, in the context of forced disappearance, constitute the administrative stage of the disappearance itself—in which López Obrador committed to solve the case, find the students, and do justice.
During the first three years of his government, López Obrador set in motion a series of actions, requested by the families of the disappeared, that indicated his willingness to investigate. He ordered all governmental offices to turn over any and all documentation related to the case, established a presidential truth commission, and invited the GIEI to return to Mexico and again assist in the investigation. The federal attorney general’s office created a special prosecutor’s office to bring together and investigate all the crimes related to the disappearance of the students. They named a prosecutor trusted by the families who had years of experience with the case.
After years of wrangling to gain access to military and national security archives, in 2021 investigators found documents and videos that proved military involvement in the disappearance, eight years of the army and navy lying and hiding documents, and federal officials participating in the torture of detainees, falsifying all manner of documents, testimonies, and evidence to create “the historical truth.”
And then, in 2022, López Obrador shut down the investigation. The military closed their archives and denied the existence of both documents that had already been retrieved as well as those still undisclosed. The federal attorney general ordered the televised arrest of the former federal attorney general, even though the case against him was still being assembled, and then used a team of internal affairs lawyers to occupy and take over the special prosecutor’s office. The special prosecutor resigned and left the country. Within a year his entire team of investigators had either been fired or resigned. The President’s truth commission published a report containing falsified screen captures that purported to solve the case. The report was immediately discredited. Two of the four members of the GIEI resigned in protest of the political meddling in the investigation. The two remaining members published a series of scathing reports and finally resigned in July 2023, saying that the army was lying and stonewalling, making any further technical assistance to the government investigation impossible.
By September 26, 2023, nine years after the attacks, López Obrador had completely derailed the investigation. In his morning press conferences, he attacked the former prosecutor, the GIEI, and the lawyers representing the families of the disappeared students. In July, 2024, he published a paranoid, histrionic “first report of the President of Mexico.” In the report, he defends the army, lies about the missing military documents, and floats a story in which the United States government mounted a conspiracy to discredit the Mexican army and Mexican national sovereignty via the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Organization of American States, the Interamerican Human Rights Commission, the GIEI, and the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (the family’s lawyers).
US intervention in Mexico is not, of course, some wild or overblown fantasy. Leaving aside the long and devastating history of US military and capital invasions of its southern neighbor, over the past fifty years, US designed and imposed “drug war” actions and logics - as well as the DEA itself as a kind of global US police force - have been tools of meddling with, pressuring, and manipulating Mexico’s public health and security regimes to fit the shifting interests of US administrations. This has always been prominent during the long transition from cold wars to drug wars to forever wars.
That said, US drug policy and the DEA—though intimately involved in and sharing responsibility for the global narcotics/terror/impunity matrix in which events like the atrocity of September 26, 2014 became possible—is not the engine behind the continued administrative disappearance of the 43 students. Nor are they behind some odd puppet show, pulling the strings behind human rights lawyers and international experts to have them discredit the Mexican army and pave the way for further US manipulation of Mexico’s national sovereignty.
The mothers and fathers of the 43 disappeared students were not beguiled by the president’s harangue: “From your presidential office, without basis in fact, you try to give us a summary with speculations and conjecture to justify a campaign promise that you did not fulfill during your six-year term.”
“You sir, Mr. President,” the families continue in the public letter they released in response to López Obrador’s report, “have lied to us, you have deceived and betrayed us. (…) We would like to remind you Mr. President, that you are not the victim, but those of us who have lost our children to the crime of forced disappearance are, a crime, by the way, that has increased as never before in the history of our nation under your government."
A little over a month later, on August 27, 2024, nine years and eleven months after the disappearance of their sons, the largest group of mothers and fathers of the 43 students stood up from the table in the midst of a meeting with López Obrador and federal officials. They broke off all dialogue with López Obrador and his government, turned, and walked away.
Military participation in both the physical disappearance of the 43 students in 2014 and the administrative disappearance of them in the years since (torturing detainees, hiding documents, lying about every aspect of the military’s actions in relation to the events and the investigation) is at the core of the ten years of struggle to find the students. It comes as little surprise that the president who has given more power and money to the army than anyone in history - the president who constantly repeats that “the soldiers are the people in uniform, loyal workers and patriots,” - would stand with them in lying about, and hence perpetuating, the forced disappearance of 43 leftwing, rural teachers’ college students.
López Obrador’s government sabotaged its own Ayotzinapa investigation, increased military power and presence in everyday life beyond anything ever seen in Mexico, and at the same time consolidated the power of his political party, Morena, with electoral victories and, now, the judicial reform that will most likely allow Morena to stack the courts. With these combined actions—and many others—it seems as if López Obrador has successfully destroyed the former dinosaur of Mexican politics, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), only to bring it back to life with a new name and recharged pseudo leftist discourse. The self-trumpeted “fourth transformation” of the nation became a zombie operation: bringing the PRI back from the dead.
I believe that the best way of understanding the feverish intensity with which now two ideologically opposed administrations have lied about what happened in Iguala, Guerrero on the night of September 26-27, 2014, is that that event reveals in unparalleled clarity the fusion of transnational criminal industry, state security forces, and the highest levels of federal government. It also shows the fusion of both the logics and tactics of counterinsurgency and those of mercantile terror economies. And both the moribund PRI under Peña Nieto and the ascendant Morena of López Obrador did everything in their power to protect that fusion rather than those getting crushed in its gears.
John Gibler is an American journalist who primarily writes about issues in Mexico. His latest books include Torn from the World: A Guerrilla's Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico (City Lights, 2018) and I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights, 2017). His reporting has included the Zapatistas Other Campaign, the Oaxaca uprising, and electoral fraud issues in Mexico City.
