The second chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014 digs into the government cover-up of the crime. 

Weeks after the disappearance, the Mexican government released its official story: Corrupt police had taken the students and handed them to members of a local gang. The gang had killed the students, then incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump. But parents of the students had their doubts. International experts begin to dismantle the government’s explanation of what happened to the young men.  

One question hanging over the families is why their sons were taken. Thousands of miles away from where the attack took place, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent thinks he knows why the students were targeted.  

The disappearance of the 43 students is part of a larger pattern of violence in Mexico, connected to the U.S. war on drugs. By the time the Ayotzinapa students were ambushed and taken, some 30,000 people had gone missing in Mexico, collateral damage in the war on drugs. Almost no one was prosecuted—instead, Mexican institutions were becoming a part of the corrupt narco system.