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Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz (c. 1994 - c. 2014) was a young man who was one of the 43 students abducted on September 26, 2014, in Igula, Mexico, by local police and cartel members. His remains were located shortly after and were identified in 2015.
Background[]
Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz was the youngest of seven brothers from a small village hidden in the Guerrilla Mountains called Omeapa. According to his family, he was looking for an opportunity to excel; he aspired to have a profession and help the community because in Omeapa, they send teachers who are not from here, they are from afar, and they are teachers who do not put enough interest in children. He initially tried to enter a public university in Puebla, but the distance and the cost made him change his mind. Guerrero went to the tuition-free Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa in Tixtla to pursue his dream. As a new student, he had responsibilities such as working on planting crops, tending the school animals, and helping raise funds for the school's activism by taking over highway booths to solicit donations and commandeering buses to carry students to events.
Case[]
Kidnapping[]
Guerrero 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 Guerrero, 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 Guerrero'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.
Guerrero's mother was shown the remains of another student and was informed they belonged to her son. Upon removing the sheet covering the body, she stated, "This is not my son." The remains were later identified as belonging to Alexander Mora. Another student, Christian Rodriguez, was identified in 2020.
Identification[]
Guerrero's remains were found in a garbage dump outside of Cocula. The remains were sent to the University of Innsbruck in Austria for DNA analysis and were identified on September 26, 2015.
Gallery[]
Sources[]
- BBC
- Diario Cambio (Spanish)
- El Pais
- Article #1 (Spanish)
- Article #2 (Spanish)
- Los Angeles Times
- 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping on Wikipedia