Mexican authorities arrested the former head of Mexico’s anti-kidnapping unit, Gualberto Ramírez Gutiérrez, on Sunday in connection to the 2014 Ayotzinapa case in which 43 students went missing. This is the first high-level arrest made by Mexico since the incident occurred. On Tuesday, a court in Toluca also charged eight soldiers with the crime of enforced disappearance of the students.
Ramírez was the former head of the Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SEIDO) Anti-Kidnapping Unit when 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College of Ayotzinapa disappeared on September 26, 2014. The students were en route to a protest when local police intercepted them near the city of Iguala. The police unlawfully detained them before turning them over to the local crime syndicate, Guerreros Unidos. The students appeared to have been massacred and incinerated by the drug gang, though clear evidence of their eventual fate remains unclear. Ramírez now faces charges of enforced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice for his involvement in the case.
The abduction and disappearance of the students have attracted continued international attention over the past decade or so. In 2016, an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights panel consisting of Latin American legal experts and human rights activists released a report which found that the Mexican government had hampered investigations into the case. The report pointed out that there was a lack of probing into high-ranking officials in the government. Then in 2018, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report detailing the evidence of torture and arbitrary detention by the Mexican government in the course of investigations. The report noted that the government used information extracted from detainees through coercion and torture in court.
In August 2022, Mexican authorities arrested the former top prosecutor for the 2014 student disappearance case, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam on the same charges. At the same time, authorities issued arrests for 83 people involved in the case.
