A judge has ordered former Guerrero Governor Ángel Aguirre to stand trial over his alleged involvement in the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Atoyzinapa Rural Teachers College.
Aguirre, governor of Guerrero from 2011 until his resignation around a month after the students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, on Sept. 26, 2014, was arrested in México state last week.
🚨Videos clave del caos Ayotzinapa no desaparecieron por un error técnico, según FGR. Esto fue lo que presuntamente destruyó Ángel Aguirre. pic.twitter.com/6YjhgPylFp
— Aristegui Noticias (@AristeguiOnline) August 7, 2026
While governor, he is alleged to have ordered the concealment and destruction of security camera video footage that showed a bus on which the Ayotzinapa students were traveling at the time it was stopped by police in Iguala.
The students disappeared after police allegedly handed them over to members of a local crime gang. All 43 young men were presumably murdered, although the remains of just three of them have been found.
During a 15-hour hearing that began on Tuesday and extended into the early hours of Wednesday, lawyers for Aguirre argued that the 70-year-old ex-governor was not in Guerrero at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2014, the time he is alleged to have received footage captured by security cameras located outside the State Palace of Justice in Iguala.
Rather, Aguirre was traveling back to Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero, at that time after attending a meeting in Mexico City with then Interior Minister Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, according to the ex-governor’s lawyers, who presented 31 pieces of evidence in support of their argument that their client is innocent.
Despite the defense lawyer’s argument and evidence, Mario Elizondo Martínez, pre-trial judge (juez de control) at the Altiplano federal prison in México state, ruled that the Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) had presented sufficient proof to warrant an order for the ex-governor to stand trial on charges of enforced disappearance.
“In response to the defense’s case presented to discredit the defendant’s possible involvement in the events, the judicial authority determined that the arguments presented were not objective and failed to prove that Ángel ‘N’ was not in the state of Guerrero, as was claimed in an attempt to exonerate him from the events,” the FGR said in a statement.
“The pre-trial judge noted that the evidence presented by the prosecutor was sufficient to issue an order to proceed to trial, since, according to the National Code of Criminal Procedure, at this stage it must only be established that there is a likelihood that the crime was committed, and further evidence must be presented in subsequent stages,” the FGR said.
The Attorney General’s Office said that Aguirre was ordered to stand trial for what it described as “his probable involvement in the crime of enforced disappearance under the hypothesis that the public servant concealed highly relevant information related to the investigation into the disappearance of the 43 students.”
Elizondo allocated a period of four months for prosecutors to continue their investigation and for defense lawyers to prepare their case. Therefore, the earliest Aguirre could face trial is in December. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 60 years in prison.
The judge ruled that the ex-governor must remain in preventive detention as he awaits trial. Aguirre has been held at the Altiplano prison since his arrest last Thursday.
The FGR’s case against Aguirre
Attorney General Ernestina Godoy said last week that a reexamination of the Ayotzinapa case “confirmed with full evidence and adherence to due process the possible participation of Ángel ‘N,’ ex-governor of the state of Guerrero, in the destruction of evidence [needed] to determine the whereabouts of the students.”
She said that in January, a cooperating witness provided testimony that “confirmed the existence of the video recordings” captured by security cameras outside the Palace of Justice in Iguala. That witness, Godoy said, identified the person who “removed” the recordings in order to “deliver them directly” to Aguirre.
The attorney general said that in May, “a second protected witness strengthened said testimony” by declaring that Aguirre “ordered, in a meeting with top officials from his government,” the concealment of “any evidence related to the events that occurred in the vicinity of the Iguala Palace of Justice.”
One witness she was referring to is Lambertina Galeana Marín, former president of the Guerrero Superior Court of Justice. The other is Blanca María del Rocío Estrada Ortega, a former official of the same court. Estrada has told authorities that she stole a disk containing the Iguala video footage from Galeana’s office on Sept. 29, 2014, and handed it over to Aguirre at 8:30 p.m. that day.
Subsequently, Aguirre allegedly handed over the video footage to former Guerrero Attorney General Iñaki Blanco in order for it to be destroyed. According to the newspaper La Jornada, the footage showed “armed people forcing the students to transfer to another bus, which minutes later fled in an unknown direction.”
The Federal Attorney General’s Office believes that the footage “contained fundamental evidence for identifying who was on board the bus and the route they took to flee Iguala,” La Jornada reported.
The newspaper also reported that the FGR’s accusation against Aguirre is “based on testimonies from two witnesses who allege that the governor … ordered that all evidence of what happened on the night of September 26 [2014] be destroyed mainly because his nephew, Ernesto Aguirre, who served as his adviser, was aware of what happened to the Ayotzinapa students from the very beginning, since he had ties to the Guerreros Unidos criminal group.”
The arrest of Aguirre is one of the most prominent detentions in connection with the Ayotzinapa case, which sparked outrage in Mexico and around the world, and triggered large protests in Mexico City and across the country. The disappearance of the students was a major blight on the 2012-18 presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, but he survived widespread calls for his removal from office.
Scores of people have been arrested in connection with the case, including soldiers, police and former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, but no has been convicted of the crime and some suspects have been released from prison.
In a 2023 report, the previous federal government led by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador outlined three “possible reasons” for the abduction of the students, one of which was “the possible presence of drugs, weapons or money” on buses Ayotzinapa students had commandeered to travel to a protest in Mexico City.
With reports from El Economista, Reforma, La Jornada, Infobae and MVS Noticias
