Detectives Looking for Missing Students Vanish in Mexico

UPDATE Mar 13, 2024 1:00 AM CDT

Two federal detectives have been found unharmed after they went missing in Mexico's Pacific coast state of Guerrero while investigating the disappearances of 43 students almost 10 years ago, the AP reports. Officials did not say Tuesday how the man and woman were found or whether they had been freed from captivity.

Mar 12, 2024 2:06 PM CDT

Two detectives looking for 43 students who went missing almost 10 years ago have themselves disappeared in Mexico's Pacific coast state of Guerrero, per the AP. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that a search effort has been launched to find the two federal detectives, a man and a woman. "I hope this is not related to those who do not want us to find the youths," he said.

• The disappearances were the latest sign of what appeared to be a generalized breakdown in law and order in Guerrero state, home to the resort of Acapulco. The state has been dogged for a decade by the case of 43 students from a rural teachers' college who disappeared in 2014 and are believed to have been abducted by local officials and turned over to a drug gang to be killed. The bodies of the missing male students are believed to have been burned afterward.

• The two missing detectives were part of a years-long effort to find where the students' remains had been dumped. The work largely involves searching for clandestine body dumping grounds in rural, isolated parts of the state where drug cartels are active.
• Students at the teachers' college, located in Tixtla, north of Acapulco, have a long history of demonstrating and clashing with police, and last week a student was shot to death in what police said was a confrontation with students riding in a stolen car.
• In terms of Guerrero, the cartels are so dominant that videos posted on social media this week showed drug gang enforcers brutally beating bus drivers in Acapulco for failing to act as lookouts. One video showed a presumed gang enforcer dealing more than a dozen hard, open-hand slaps to a driver and calling him an "animal," and demanding he check in several times a day with the gang.

(More Mexico stories.)