Alexander Mora Venancio (born c. 1995) was a young man who was one of the 43 students abducted on September 26, 2014, in Iguala, Mexico, by local police and cartel members. His remains were located in November 2014 and were identified a month later.
Background[]
Mora grew up in El Pericon, Mexico. According to his father, Ezequiel, his son aspired to be a teacher, emphasizing that nobody could take that idea from him. Although they were farmers and he helped in the fields, Mora was determined to study. He attended the tuition-free Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa, where his responsibilities as a new student included planting crops, tending to the school animals, and raising funds for the school's activism. This involved taking over highway booths to solicit donations and commandeering buses to transport students to events.
Kidnapping[]
Mora was one of about a hundred students who commandeered several buses at 6:00 PM to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. On their way, they were stopped by the Iguala municipal police force around 9:30 PM, reportedly on the orders of the mayor, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, using gunfire and roadblocks. A chase between the buses and the police followed, during which six people were killed, three of whom were civilians in unrelated buses or taxis. After the shootings, 43 students, including Mora, were arrested by the police and taken to the police in Cocula. It is believed that the students were then handed over to Guerreros Unidos, a criminal gang that splintered from the now-defunct Beltrán-Leyva Cartel and presumably killed.
Investigation[]
In January 2015, former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam claimed that it was the historical truth that the bodies of the students, including Mora's body, had been incinerated in a massive fire at a garbage dump in Cocula and their ashes were thrown into the San Juan River. However, experts and the students' families have not accepted this version of events.
After the mass kidnapping, Mexican authorities have arrested eighty suspects, including forty-four police officers and the police chief of Iguala, Felipe Flores Velásquez. The mayor of Iguala, Abarca Velázquez, and his wife have been identified as the masterminds behind the kidnappings, but they have not yet been put on trial. In June 2020, the leader of the Guerreros Unidos, José Ángel Casarrubias Salgado, also known as "El Mochomo," was arrested and is believed to be responsible for the mass kidnapping and murder of the students. There have been accusations against the Mexican Federal Police and the 27th Infantry Battalion of the Mexican Army, with journalist Anabel Hernandez claiming that two of the buses held heroin that the students were not aware of and that a drug lord ordered the battalion's colonel to intercept the drugs. It has been suggested that the students were killed because they were witnesses to this event, but these claims have not been proven yet.
Identification[]
In November 2014, the charred remains of Mora Venancio were found in a garbage dump in Cocula, near El Pericon, about 124 miles south of Iguala. The remains were sent to the University of Innsbruck in Austria for DNA analysis, and only one bone fragment was identified as belonging to Mora Venancio. Subsequently, the remains of Jhosivani Guerrero and Christian Rodriguez were also identified.
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