On October 27, 2015, a little over a year after 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college were disappeared in Iguala, Héctor Astudillo was sworn in as the 83rd governor of the state of Guerrero. He took office amid violence, criminal conflicts, social mobilizations and political instability. The previous elected governor—Ángel Aguirre—had resigned following the Iguala disappearance, and an interim government under Rogelio Ortega had governed the state until Astudillo’s election.

Such situations were not new in the state. In 1996, Aguirre had himself replaced Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, who had stepped down following the 1995 Aguas Blancas massacre. But if violence had a political cost, the dynamics seemed to be changing.

Following the events of September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero became the focus of national and international media attention. The Ayotzinapa case revealed rampant collusion between organized crime and local political structures. The former PRD mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, Ángeles Pineda, were allegedly leaders of the Guerreros Unidos criminal group, which was responsible for the disappearance. The PRD would pay a price for this at the polls.

In 2015, political violence intertwined with criminal violence. For years in the state, regional bosses who had used violence to control politics in rural fiefdoms such as the Figueroas in the north, or Aguirres in the Costa Chica, were becoming increasingly numerous and visible. Political violence was becoming a resource to conquer territories where social movements were pressuring for justice.

With Ayotzinapa making the marriage between politics and crime impossible to ignore, the state government was knocked on its heels. And in this unsettled situation, new cacicazgos—those violent political fiefdoms—were born, and the state’s arms race continued. Since 2013, a new boom of civilian self-defense groups had occurred, and over time, these came to mimic the behaviors of criminal gunmen. These were hardly ideal conditions for an election.

Both before and after the elections of 2015, Guerrero was in turmoil. One of the most shocking occurrences was the murder of Ulises Fabián Quiroz, the PRI’s candidate for the municipality of Chilapa—a place with high levels of homicides, disappearances, and political assassinations. It was apparent that the challenge was to win the election without dying in the process.

Ayotzinapa fundamentally undermined the credibility of the PRD in the state, eroding the popularity of a party that had been born of leftist political movements during the years of authoritarian government and had paid for its opposition to the PRI in blood: many party activists were murdered. The tragedy also delegitimized the federal PRI government of Enrique Peña Nieto, which as tasked with overseeing the elections.

Citizen rejection of the process was thus widespread. The Movimiento Popular Guerrerense (MPG) for its part, attempted to obstruct the elections until the Ayotzinapa students were returned alive. The group, which was comprised of activists, members of a teachers’ union, and other historical dissidents, failed to block the election entirely but did succeed in forcing the annulment of votes in Tixtla, hometown to 14 of the missing 43.

In La democracia no se construyó en un día, the president of the National Electoral Institute (INE), Lorenzo Cordova and political journalist Ernesto Nuñez recount the tension of those days. “On March 26, 2015, six months after the disappearance, a delegation of parents, lawyers, students, and activists arrived at the offices of the INE. Their buses parked around the building on Viaducto Tlalpan and Periférico Sur, blocking traffic. The group demanded a meeting to deliver a document demanding the cancellation of Guerrero’s elections.”

In the letter the activists delivered to the INE, they demanded fundamental changes: “First, it is necessary to restore the social fabric, eliminating clientelistic processes around elections, which means the death of political parties, because there will no longer be an exchange of votes for handouts.” Instead of conventional elections, the letter goes on to propose the naming of popular councils following the rules of indigenous self-governance and usos y costumbres. These changes fell on deaf ears, however, and the elections proceeded.

In Guerrero there were dozens of protests at both the local offices of the INE and the state electoral institute. Election officials were detained and dozens of electoral announcements were marked with the protest slogans “Fue el estado” and “Nos faltan 43.”

Even with Peña Nieto’s political capital spent, Astudillo was able to win a resounding victory in 2015. The governorship that the PRI had lost in 2005 to the PRD candidate Zeferino Torreblanca—a loss that ended 72 years of PRI rule in the state—was recaptured thanks to Ayotzinapa and the total collapse of the PRD’s credibility in the state and its manifest links to organized crime.

As Guerrero’s citizens prepare to vote in 2021, Ayotzinapa remains an indelible reminder of impunity and the state’s pervasive political violence.