Over a decade since 43 students from a rural teacher’s college vanished in southern Mexico, the authorities have arrested a new suspect that has put renewed focus on the case. Mexican authorities on Thursday arrested Lambertina Galeana Marin, a 79-year-old retired judge, over missing footage from security cameras at the Palace of Justice in Iguala, Guerrero state, where the students were last spotted.
Marin, the president of Guerrero’s Superior Court of Justice at the time of the incident, is accused of disappearing important video evidence. Arrest orders were issued against a number of officials, including police officers and military commanders, in 2022 but their names were not initially revealed.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum commented on Marin’s arrest in a Friday press briefing, noting that the special prosecutor’s office is looking into why such crucial videos were deleted. Families of the missing students have complained about the disappearance of this evidence for years.
The students, who were all male students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College, went missing on September 26, 2014, when their bus was intercepted by local police and the military at Iguala. Just what happened afterward is unclear, but photographs from the scene reveal a bullet-punctured bus.
A 2022 government report characterized the vanishing as a “state-sponsored crime.” In 2023, a United Nations report disclosed that Mexico’s Armed Forces withheld data from an independent investigative panel. That same year, some panel experts stepped down, calling for secrecy and withheld evidence.
