Today we get a chance to talk about a region, Latin America, that we do not cover often enough. We discuss institutional violence and enforced disappearances in Mexico, where approximately 117,000 people are currently missing and most of the crimes remain unresolved. And we do so by looking at one of its most infamous cases, together with someone who has been at the very centre of seeking justice for it.
On the night of September 26, 2014, 43 students disappeared from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School in the state of Guerrero, approximately 300 km south of Mexico City.
Initially, the state authorities said they were abducted and killed by a local gang, the Guerreros Unidos. However, later investigations found that the operation involved not only the gang members but also police at the local, state and federal levels. Over ten years on, only two bodies have been identified and the crime continues to shake Mexico.
We talked about this case and its reverberations with Omar Gómez Trejo, the former lead prosecutor of the special criminal unit created to investigate the Ayotzinapa case. In 2022, he decided to leave Mexico after mounting pressure against him and the investigation by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and he is a visiting scholar at the Human Rights Center at the Law School in Berkeley University, US.
Omar tells us how he first got involved in the investigation, what has been uncovered so far, and how the families have been central to not giving up on justice. He also takes us through his years as a prosecutor, what internal challenges he had to face, and why he decided to resign and leave Mexico. He had to leave Mexico one more time before, at a time when his phone was infected with the Pegasus spyware that targeted many lawyers and human rights defenders. Finally, we asked him what lessons from the Ayotzinapa case could be instrumental to find the truth and justice for more disappeared people (here’s our earlier episode on enforced disappearances for more on the crime).
Omar remembers the teaching of international lawyer José Zalaquett on transnational justice in Latin America. And he shares a book he really enjoyed recently, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza ( in Spanish: El invencible verano de Liliana).
This podcast has been produced as part of a partnership with JusticeInfo.net, an independent website in French and English covering justice initiatives in countries dealing with serious violence. It is a media outlet of Fondation Hirondelle, based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
