A Mexican governor, Angel Aguirre, 58, has resigned following increasingly violent protests over the fate of 43 students who vanished in his state after being allegedly abducted by police last month.
Angel Aguirre, governor of Guerrero state, said he requested an indefinite leave of absence—the usual way that governors in Mexico resign—to facilitate the search for the missing students.
“I am convinced this is the most responsible decision,” said Mr. Aguirre..
The governor has been under pressure since police in the Guerrero city of Iguala killed six people and detained 43 college students last month before allegedly delivering them to a local drug cartel, prosecutors say. The missing students are widely believed to be dead.
Mr. Aguirre, a member of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, is the second Mexican governor driven from office recently by public fury against gangland violence and the alleged connivance of local and state officials with gangsters.
In June, the governor of next-door Michoacán state also stepped down, following 16 months of armed insurrection by so-called self-defense groups fighting to oust the Knights Templar cartel.
Both are signs that while Mexico’s government has pushed through ambitious economic and political overhauls, it hasn’t been equally successful in tackling the country’s deep-seated security problems.
Mr. Aguirre is a political ally of Iguala’s fugitive Mayor José Luis Abarca, whom federal officials say ordered city police to detain the students. Officials also accuse the mayor’s wife of belonging to the local drug cartel, called the Guerreros Unidos, or United Warriors.
Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party and conservative National Action Party had both called on the governor to step down, a call echoed by many members of his own party.
Protesters demanding Mr. Aguirre’s resignation and the safe return of the missing students set fire Wednesday to the city hall in Iguala, Guerrero’s third largest city. Last week, protesters gutted government offices at Guerrero’s state capital of Chilpancingo. Tens of thousands protested peacefully across Mexico on Wednesday, including an estimated 50,000 who marched in Mexico City, for the students’ safe return and Mr. Aguirre’s resignation.
Mexican officials have blamed the Iguala shootings and abductions on Mr. Abarca, the fugitive mayor, and his wife. Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam this week said Mr. Abarca ordered the police to detain the students who he believed were on the way to disrupt an outdoor event hosted by his wife, who townspeople say was running to replace him as Iguala’s mayor in elections set for July.
Mr. Murillo Karam said the mayor and his wife were in the pay of Guerreros Unidos, a local criminal gang which paid them up to $230,000 a month, and the Iguala police department another $50,000. He said Mr. Abarca’s wife had close family ties to the Guerreros Unidos.
Mr. Aguirre had spent most of this political career with Mr. Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century and returned to national power in 2012 after a 12-year hiatus.
He was named interim governor of Guerrero in 1996, when the massacre by state police of 17 protesting farmers forced his predecessor from office. Two years later, with Mr. Aguirre in the statehouse, Mexican soldiers killed 11 community activists meeting in a schoolhouse in a Guerrero mountain village.
Mr. Aguirre changed parties in 2010 after failing to win the PRI’s gubernatorial nomination and won the governorship the next year.
“When he split from the PRI he took a whole bunch of local operatives with him to the PRD,” said Dwight Dyer, senior Latin America analyst for Control Risks, the London based security consultancy, referring to the leftist party by its initials. Should they change party loyalties again, those operatives and the voters they influence could return the state to PRI control in July’s election, Mr. Dyer said. [myad]
