CNN
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More than a decade after 43 students from rural colleges of education disappeared in southern Mexico, new arrests spark fresh scrutiny and reopened old wounds. On Thursday, Mexican authorities detained 79-year-old Lambertina Galeana Marin, now a retired judge.
The arrest is linked to the “loss of recordings from cameras” placed at the Judicial Palace in Iguara, Guerrero, Mexico, where a student was last seen.
Marin served as president of Guerrero’s Senior Court of Justice at the time of the incident. The arrest warrant was issued in August 2022 to military commanders, police officers and “Five Administrative and Judicial Authorities in the State of Guerrero,” but at the time the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) did not identify any suspicious individuals.
Mexican President Claudia Sinbaum spoke about Marin’s arrest at a press conference Friday morning. She said the special prosecutor’s office is investigating why the video related to the case was erased. This is the issue she noticed that families of those who disappeared in 2014 have been procuring for a long time.
Sinbaum replaced Andre’s Manuel Lopez Obrador in 2024 and left the presidency without fulfilling his important pledge to uncover the truth about the disappearance of students in 2014.
Cases of missing students have long held Mexico. Students were travelling to Iguara, a Southwestern city of Iguara, where buses were stopped by local police and military forces on September 26, 2014. What happened after that interaction is still unknown, but the photographs of the scene show a bus covered in bullets.
A 2022 government report concluded that the vanished students were victims of “state sponsored crimes.” In 2023, a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico found that Mexican troops did not provide all the information requested by an independent panel investigating the disappearance. That same year, experts on that panel left, citing “lack of information,” “secrets,” and “hidden evidence” surrounding investigative efforts.
For mourning families, the arrest strengthens suspicions of possible cover-up related to the 2014 loss disappearance. Felipe de La Cruz, one of Ayotzinapa’s parents and a spokesman for the group of vanished parents, told CNN on Thursday that the area’s “silence agreement continues to govern.”
“For us, first and foremost, it’s very important that the research continues and that work continues,” added De La Cruz.
