Nine years ago today, 43 Mexican college students were violently abducted and disappeared by police and drug traffickers in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. As the families of the missing boys mark another wrenching anniversary and the investigation in Mexico grinds on, the National Security Archive takes a look at the declassified record on Ayotzinapa in the United States and asks, Why has the U.S. government released so little information about this case? Since 2017, the National Security Archive and our colleagues at the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) have filed over 150 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests about the attacks against the students of the Ayotzinapa teacher-training school, the investigations that followed, and a related DEA operation targeting Mexican drug traffickers who were distributing huge quantities of heroin in Chicago, Illinois. We hoped to obtain new facts about a case that had been muddied and obscured by investigators in Mexico. We also wanted to know whether the shocking crime had any impact on U.S. policy in Mexico. Did the revelations about the case affect U.S.-Mexico relations? In particular, did concerns about Ayotzinapa have any impact on the longstanding cooperation between the two countries in waging the so-called “war on drugs”?
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