Journalist's Fearless Investigation of Mexico Massacre

On September 26, 2014, police in the Mexican town of Iguala intercepted a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, located in the Guerrero state, a region rife with drug-related violence. The students—also called normalistas—had been stopped for hijacking two buses to travel to Mexico City, where they intended to join the annual march that commemorates the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, a national scandal in which hundreds of students and civilians were killed by the military. In the subsequent clash, six students, all in their 20s, were killed and another 25 wounded. Forty-three simply vanished.

The government’s official investigation foundover to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which killed and then burned the missing students in a trash pit in Cocula. Mexicans rejected that version, and thousands demonstrated, shouting, “They took them from us alive, want them back alive” and “ [It was the state!].”