Ayotzinapa Families Lawyer Rosales Goes to Supreme Court

ByMexico Solidarity

This article by Jared Laureles and Daniel González appeared in the August 21, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Mexico City. Vidulfo Rosales Sierra has resigned from the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center, thereby leaving his legal representation of the parents of the 43 Ayotzinapa students who disappeared in 2014. Sources close to the case indicated that he has joined the team of Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, the first elected Indigenous minister of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN).

The lawyer, born in 1976 in the town of Totomixtlahuaca, municipality of Tlacoapa, collaborated with the Tlachinollan Center for 24 years and advised community police, defended women victims of torture and peasants from the dispossession of their lands, as well as victims of disappearances, and maintained a close relationship with the victims of the Iguala case.

In a letter, he asserted that his commitment to Indigenous peoples remains “unwavering. I cannot shirk my class duty. I am from an Indigenous community nestled in the rugged and enchanting Guerrero Mountains. All my life I have walked against the current along steep paths, a product of poverty and marginalization, which is why I have the capacity to feel the injustices committed against anyone, anywhere.”

Rosales Sierra thanked the director of the Tlachinollan Center, Abel Barrera, for the opportunity to defend the disadvantaged. “Tlachinollan is the home that sheltered me and forged me as a defender and lawyer.”

“Abel Barrera’s words ring in my ear, telling me that I should go see the Ayotzinapa students murdered on the Autopista del Sol in Chilpancingo, or that early morning of September 27th, telling me that I had to go to Iguala for the disappearance of the 43 students, or the recent call informing me that water defender Marco Antonio Suástegui Muñoz had been fatally wounded,” Rosales said.

In his statement, the lawyer stated that he is retiring from the “front lines of the social struggle with his head held high, confident that he has contributed his part to the struggle of our people.”

However, he asserted that from other positions he will continue to demand “that human rights become a reality, that Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples have a dignified life and that we not be treated as second-class citizens.”

Rosales thanked various social and human rights organizations, such as the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities (CRAC-PC), the Council of Ejidos and Communities Opposed to the La Parota Dam (CECOP), and the mothers and fathers of the 43 normalistas for their teachings “in the struggle they wage day after day for water, land, for the normative systems of indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples, for public education, for truth, justice, and because we are missing 43 and thousands more.”