A great deal has changed in the 11 years since the news of the missing 43 broke. In the immediate aftermath, Mexico experienced the most significant demonstrations the country had seen since the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost power in 2000. Pessimists worried that the country was at risk of sinking into an authoritarian morass, a “failed state” where the escalation of militarized policing would shatter its young democracy.[1] Stories of state surveillance of human rights activists and journalists (undertaken using Pegasus software purchased from the Israeli NSO Group), of the rise of self-defense forces, of the grotesque corruption of the Peña Nieto regime and his allies, some of whom were clearly in league with drug traffickers, mapped onto our knowledge of the persistent grinding inequality in the country to foretell a future in which Mexico’s institutions would not hold. And yet they did. The failure that so many feared transpired north of the border.
The concept of state failure has long been critiqued for its problematic assumptions. Even detractors might have been surprised however, by the ways in which the last decade saw the collapse of its normative power, overtaken by events that revealed its core weakness: the fact that the very notion of state failure requires that the failing state be diagnosed from the perspective of a state that has not failed, a state with strong institutions, rule of law, minimal political violence and corruption. At worst, the concept minimizes the role of quasi-imperial entanglements in state failure. At best, it is rooted in self-confident assumptions about what a non-failing state looks like. These claims gain their power in part through forms of soft power, through the tendency of citizens of countries like Mexico to admire the US even as they decry North American depredations in their own country. Polls dating back decades indicated that Mexicans consistently viewed the US in a positive light, as a country less hobbled by the corruption, violence, and political rot that characterized their own country. These sentiments underpinned a larger belief that the best alternatives for Mexico lay in closer integration with the US. That era is over, and Ayotzinapa is one reason why.
The story of the murders is well documented. On the night of September 26, 2014, a group of students from the Escuela Normal Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, commandeered five buses in Iguala, Guerrero, so that they could travel to Mexico City for commemorations of the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre on October 2. This was not unusual. Protestors have commandeered buses in the past, with relatively little violence. Just not this time. Officials in Iguala quickly called out the local police, who attacked both the students and another bus carrying a local soccer team. Six people were killed and dozens were wounded in the confrontations, which resulted in the detention of 43 students from the school. By the next morning, they had vanished.
Federal officials quickly settled on local culprits. The official story was that local police detained the students and then turned them over to members of a local drug gang, the Guerreros Unidos (GU), who took them to a garbage dump in the nearby town of Cocula, where they were killed and then cremated. In the weeks following the massacre, Mexico’s Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam arrested several people, including Iguala’s mayor and his wife, and declared the case closed.
No one believed him, for good reason. As Murillo Karam’s lies unraveled, the list of those who seemed likely to be involved in the crime and its cover-up rapidly expanded. Guerrero’s governor, officials at a nearby army base, and even the president were implicated. Reports in Proceso revealed that the confessions the state had used to close the case were obtained under torture, raising questions about the Army’s role in the atrocity.[2] An Argentine forensics team brought to investigate the crime added to the public’s anger when they determined that the evidence in and around Cocula did not support the government’s claims, and their efforts to interview local soldiers or even enter the local army base were rebuffed by federal officials.
Even after the protests began to die down, the slow drip of news about the missing 43 meant that neither Enrique Peña Nieto nor the PRI could escape Ayotzinapa’s shadow. Thanks in large part to the dogged reporting of Anabel Hernández, the evidence that emerged over the next few years included footage that appeared to show Mexican Marines planting evidence at the Cocula garbage dump and a tranche of damning recordings and texts released by the DEA which hinted at the true reason for the crime: The GU had been using passenger buses from Iguala to ship heroin to its associates in Chicago, and the buses commandeered by the students may have contained upwards of $2 million US in heroin.[3] The new evidence also showed that the officials at the local Army base had monitored the entire incident, that there were soldiers embedded with the students at Ayotzinapa as informants (one soldier is among the missing), and that soldiers likely participated directly in the murders.
These stories may have fatally damaged the PRI, but they did little to rescue the country from the violence of the drug war. Since 2007, the government had been cooperating closely with the US on interdictions thanks to the Merida Accords. Prior to Ayotzinapa, Mexicans had complained for years about the flow of illegal weapons into the country, about the way that the pursuit of the drug war compromised Mexican sovereignty, yet most of these complaints did not gain the traction required to shift the Overton Window. It took Donald Trump to do that and, in turn, transform Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) from a two-time loser in the presidential elections into the leader of a party that currently enjoys an unprecedented level of domestic support.
The rise of his party, the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), was the result of developments both within and external to Mexico. As the PRI cratered in the late 1990s, brought down at least in part by its own scandals, its logical successor was the National Action Party (PAN), which promised to further extend the neoliberal policies embraced by the bankers and economists. The left alternative, represented by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), claimed just 17% of the vote in the 2000 presidential elections in part because he seemed out of step with the moment. Even as AMLO revived the party’s fortunes in the years leading to the 2006 elections, he narrowly lost in a campaign where his enemies cast him as an acolyte of Hugo Chávez. Six years later, with the PAN mired in its own scandals, the PRI roared back into power behind Peña Nieto, whose sunny promises for the future gained enough purchase to secure victory over AMLO, who won only 32.41% of the vote. It seemed then that the PRD would never win the presidency, that the neoliberal agendas of the PAN and PRI collectively represented majoritarian sentiments in the country.
The fracturing of this consensus and the rise of Morena occurred simultaneously. Morena registered as a political party in 2014, embracing a call for national rebirth and an end to the drug war that was echoed in the voices that rose in protest that Fall. Mexicans were already exhausted by the U.S. led drug war. President Trump extended that sentiment to widespread exhaustion with the US. It was not merely that Trump was immensely unpopular in Mexico in the runup to the 2018 elections, it was that Mexicans were, as Joe Strummer once famously intoned, “so bored with the USA.” Polls taken in late 2017 showed that for the first time since pollsters had asked the question, 65% of Mexicans had an unfavorable opinion of the US. In the same polling, 55% of Mexicans favored deepening their relationships with other Latin American countries over closer relations with the US, and 59% of Mexicans indicated that the US had a negative international impact. Eighty-nine percent of Mexicans who responded to those pollsters had a negative view of Trump.[4]
These sentiments clearly played out in the presidential election, where AMLO won 53.19% of the vote. For the first time in decades, a sovereigntist candidate whose politics called for a clear break with the US-led neoliberal order won a majority of the vote at the national level, a level of support that AMLO depended on as he translated those proposals into policy. His social policies included a combination of direct aid to the poor, an increase of the minimum wage, microcredits for small businesses, scholarships for students, old age pensions, efforts to revive domestic agriculture and forestry, investments in urban areas characterized by high rates of poverty, and the construction of new transportation infrastructure. During his term, the poverty rate fell from 41.9% to 36.3%, the lowest rate it had been in decades.
These initiatives alone do not explain his popularity. Amid persistently high poll numbers indicating a general disdain for the US, in general, and Trump in particular, AMLO burnished his image by situating himself as a fierce defender of Mexican sovereignty, fighting enemies foreign and domestic.[5] In October 2020, when former Defense Secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos was arrested in Los Angeles for trafficking, AMLO claimed misconduct on the part of US agents in Mexico and threatened to expel the DEA from the country. The US government quickly backtracked, and sent Cienfuegos back to Mexico in November, where he was later bestowed with new military honors. The following year, Mexico abandoned the Merida Accords, ending a 14-year partnership in militarized drug enforcement as a component of a policy AMLO called “hugs not bullets.” The policy itself was a failure (there were 171,000 murders in Mexico during his sexenio, including 47 journalists), yet these failures did little to diminish the popularity of a message that situated the drug war as a foreign intervention.
His sovereigntist claims were also central to AMLO’s reforms in Mexico’s education sector and judiciary. Judicial reform was popular, in part because of a broadly shared sentiment that the system is corrupt, arbitrary, protects the powerful, and does not serve the interests of the people. AMLO’s answer to the problem lay in the popular election of judges, a largely symbolic but nonetheless resonant gesture (dysfunction in the judicial system lies more clearly with prosecutors than judges).[6] Eighty percent of Mexicans favored the reforms, particularly because they would also reduce the salaries paid to judges.
AMLO’s decision to target the educational sector followed similar logic. He cast the researchers he attacked as privileged and out of touch, and claimed that elite institutions like CONACYT and CIDE, and UNAM more generally, had betrayed the Mexican people, that they were agents of neoliberalism, of the “hamburguesamiento” of their students, workers, and teachers.[7] He took particular aim at scholars who had been educated at or had ties to US universities, insisting that those Mexicans who studied abroad mainly learned how to steal. More generally, he recast study abroad as elitist, classist, even racist.
Replacing leadership in many of these institutions with individuals more loyal to the regime, he sought to shift the nature of the research undertaken in these institutes to better serve his understanding of the national interest. CONACYT was forced to reduce its scholarships for study abroad by 50%,[8] and several of its leading researchers were targeted with sanctions. He even went so far as to seek the arrest of 31 CONACYT researchers, claiming they had misappropriated research funds, though he failed to sustain the charges on three separate occasions. This last initiative was sufficiently problematic that it was even opposed by some of his own close allies (Claudia Sheinbaum spoke up in opposition).
Mistakes were made, not the least of them his botched effort to arrest the researchers. AMLO’s handling of the COVID 19 pandemic was widely criticized both in Mexico and abroad. Some of his infrastructure programs met fierce opposition from constituencies he courted. AMLO was also accused of spying on and silencing his critics,[9] and of undermining the federal elections agency in a bid to concentrate power. On top of this, after making Ayotzinapa a signature issue in his election campaign, the results of his Presidential Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case fell flat. The commission, headed by Alejandro Encinas, made a splash in 2022 when its report declared Ayotzinapa a “crime of the state,” directly implicating the army in the murder of at least six students. AMLO responded by shutting the commission down and protecting the Army.[10]
And still, AMLO grew more popular. In 2022, he survived a recall election (he had promised to call a referendum on his presidency on the campaign trail) with 93.45% of the vote in his favor. Towards the end of his administration, 80% of Mexicans viewed him positively. While only 6% of Mexicans thought the country’s democracy was functioning well in 2017, by 2023 that number had climbed to 48%.[11] It is little wonder then that Sheinbaum, his hand-picked successor, cruised to victory in 2024, even as the PRI, PAN, and remnants of the PRD joined forces to contest the election. Sheinbaum won 61.18% of the vote, the only true landslide election the country has seen since the democratic opening of the late 1990s.[12]
Morena’s critics fear that the party represents a return to one-party rule. They point to evidence of democratic backsliding––judicial and electoral reform, the attacks on researchers, the harassment of critics, and the violence that accompanied the election itself––as signs that democracy is at risk. To be sure, no student of the Mexican past can assume that Morena’s liberal democratic commitments are deeply felt. But then, we are at a historical juncture where we also cannot assume that the liberal democratic commitments of the United States are deeply or earnestly felt. That shift has scrambled the game. It is one of the reasons Morena’s muscular embrace of Mexican sovereignty won the 2024 elections and it is why the party’s popularity has grown since then. With Trump’s return to office in January, polls showed 69% of Mexicans had a negative view of the US, and 91% had little or no confidence that Trump would do the right thing when it came to global affairs.[13] Early in her term, Sheinbaum retains an astonishingly high approval rate. Polls in May 2025 gave Sheinbaum between 73% and 80% approval rating. Her administration received high scores on the economy and social programs, low scores on corruption and organized crime. Public security was a wash.[14]
Two decades ago, when Mexican audiences watched the climate disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, audiences cheered as North Americans clamored to cross the border into Mexico to escape the onset of a new ice age. Their cheers were telling and cathartic, a carnivalesque moment in which Mexico survived while the US collapsed. Amid the dire warnings of climate scientists, the film was fantastical in part because it imagined that powerful and wealthy nations of the Global North might be the first to suffer collapse in the climate crisis.
In 2026 we may not be facing a new and sudden ice age, yet societies across the planet that long felt the weight of US hegemony nonetheless find themselves on new ground as the result of a different sort of collapse. Some of those outcomes entail great tragedy. In others, the collapse has clearly created new opportunities. For Mexico, that shift portends a great many things: a more robust defense of sovereignty, a foreign policy that de-emphasizes Mexican dependence on the US in favor of closer ties to other Latin American, European, and Asian states, and a first opening in decades for policies that seek to directly confront the country’s persistent inequality. The future of the era of free markets and rapid accumulation by the extremely wealthy is clearly in doubt. One thing is not: the era of US soft power is over.