The special prosecutor leading the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School in Guerrero earned a rebuke from President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday after stating that authorities have been “searching for corpses.”
“We have visited more than 800 sites in the mountains [of Guerrero] searching for corpses,” Rosendo Gómez Piedra told reporters outside the National Palace in Mexico City before a meeting on Tuesday with parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College students who were abducted in Iguala in September 2014 and presumably killed.
🔴 #IMPORTANTE | Rosendo Gómez Piedra, Fiscal Especial para el caso Ayotzinapa informó que uno de los avances que presentará a los padres de los estudiantes desaparecidos de Ayotzinapa es la detención de la ex magistrada Lambertina Galeana por haber desaparecido los videos del… pic.twitter.com/mOofObEg3e
— @diario24horas (@diario24horas) May 27, 2025
Remains of just three of the students have been found and formally identified.
The Ayotzinapa case remains unresolved almost 11 years after the students — all young men — were allegedly abducted by members of a Guerrero-based crime gang after a bus they had commandeered to travel to a protest in Mexico City was stopped by allegedly corrupt municipal police.
The Mexican Army has also been accused of involvement in the disappearance of the students, which was a major blight on the 2012-18 presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto.
“Fue el estado,” or “It was the state,” has been chanted by hundreds of thousands if not millions of Mexicans at countless marches and protests since the disappearance of the students.
Gómez, head of a Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) unit focused on the Ayotzinapa case, highlighted on Tuesday that 120 people are in custody in connection with the abduction of the students and noted that some 46 criminal cases are in process.
No one has ever been convicted of involvement in the kidnapping and presumed murder of the 43 young men.
Gómez stressed that investigations are ongoing.
“Now, if you ask me whether we’ve found the young men, [I will say] we haven’t found them, but the investigations are continuing, the processes don’t stop,” he said.
Sheinbaum: Gómez’s ‘searching for corpses’ remark ‘very unfortunate’
At Sheinbaum’s morning press conference on Wednesday, a reporter noted that Gómez said that authorities are searching for the corpses of the missing students and asked the president whether her government believes the young men are dead.
“It’s a very unfortunate statement,” Sheinbaum said before noting that former deputy interior minister Alejandro Encinas — who led an Ayotzinapa truth commission during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s 2018-24 presidency — had made a similar remark.
“The statement is not very fortunate but the important thing is that we continue working [on the case],” she said.
Students’ parents call for removal of special prosecutor Gómez
On Tuesday, parents of the 43 students called for the dismissal of Gómez, who faces accusations of embezzlement, extortion, abuse of authority, bribery and intimidation.
“The parents are asking for the departure of Rosendo,” said Melitón Ortega, father of one of the missing men and a spokesperson for the mothers and fathers whose lives changed forever when their sons disappeared on Sept. 26, 2014.
Questioned as to why the parents want Gómez to be fired, Ortega cited the corruption allegations against the Ayotzinapa special prosecutor.
The mothers and fathers of the missing students have evidently lost faith in his capacity to lead an investigation that will result in a resolution of the almost 11-year-old case.
“He hasn’t been competent in his position,” Mario González, father of another of the missing students, told the news magazine Proceso.
“And recently other things that we didn’t know have been discovered, like how he got drunk during searches for our sons, that he threw parties, that he went home [from work] at 1 in the afternoon and didn’t return. In other words, he didn’t do his job,” he said.
Sheinbaum on Wednesday acknowledged that the parents have asked for a “change” in the leadership of the FGR unit conducting the Ayotzinapa investigation.
“We are looking to see if it is necessary or not,” she said.
“In any case, the … [Attorney General Alejandro] Gertz, on our proposal, is strengthening the Attorney General’s Office with people who specialize in … [new] ways of investigating, which will allow us to open new routes in order to know the truth,” Sheinbaum said.
‘We’re developing new schemes of investigation’
Sheinbaum, who met with the students’ parents for around three hours on Tuesday, told reporters that the federal government, through the Security Ministry and the FGR, is “developing new schemes of investigation” aimed at getting to the bottom of the Ayotzinapa case.
“I don’t want to give much more information but it has to do with different schemes of investigation to those that have been followed up until now,” she said.
“And we’ve been in contact with the relatives, the mothers and the fathers, to explain what they are,” Sheinbaum said.
“That is giving us a lot more information so I have the hope, because certainty is sometimes difficult [to have], … that this new way of investigating will take us to what all Mexicans want. … We want the truth, justice and to find the young men,” she said.
Sheinbaum added that the parents of the missing students “agree” with the use of new “forms of investigation.”
“We’re working with them because we believe we must respect them,” she said.
Melitón Ortega said on Tuesday that Sheinbaum has shown a “willingness to continue working until we reach the truth.”
“… We will continue to give … [our] confidence to the president,” he said.
With reports from El Universal, Sin Embargo, Proceso, Milenio and N+
