An illustration in shades of pink and orange show a dia de los muertos ofrenda covered in marigolds.
Credit: Illustration by Dante Aguilera

Adonde Media, an international, multilingual podcast production company, has developed an expanded Spanish-language version of the After Ayotzinapa series, Reveal’s investigation into the 2014 kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico. Después de Ayotzinapa premiered March 22, with new episodes to be released every Tuesday and Thursday through April 7.

This is Reveal’s first Spanish-language collaboration for a podcast series. After Ayotzinapa is co-produced by PRX, and both productions are a collaboration with the National Security Archive.

“Telling this story for a U.S. audience in English is very different from telling it for a Mexican audience in Spanish. From the beginning, we knew that it was important and vital for this investigation and series to reach people directly affected in Mexico,” said Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, lead reporter for the series. “For Reveal and Adonde, Después de Ayotzinapa is an opportunity to bring this caliber of journalism in a serialized, cutting-edge format to new audiences across Latin America to present this story in a way nobody else has done before.”

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About the Ayotzinapa case

On Sept. 26, 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero, Mexico, were taken by armed men in the middle of the night. They were never seen again.

Their disappearance sparked mass protests in Mexico, as the 43 became symbols of the country’s unchecked human rights abuses. In recent decades, tens of thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico, and almost no one has been held accountable. The culture of impunity is so ingrained that families often don’t go to police for help, believing they’re either corrupt or too afraid to investigate.

About After Ayotzinapa

In a three-part investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, Diaz-Cortes and Kate Doyle from the National Security Archive take us inside the investigation into the attack on the students. They have help from Omar Gómez Trejo – the man the Mexican president tapped to prosecute the crime. For more than a year, he kept audio diaries and had regular conversations with Diaz-Cortes and Doyle, giving them insight into a massive cover-up by the previous Mexican administration and efforts by current investigators to piece together the details of the attack and bring to justice those responsible.

The series also includes vivid first-person accounts never previously broadcast:

  • Recorded testimonies with survivors of the attack.
  • An interview with a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was the first to make a possible connection between a drug trafficking ring outside Chicago and the students’ disappearance.
  • Testimony from a former suspect in the case who was tortured by Mexican officials, forced to confess involvement in the students’ attack and imprisoned without a trial – only to be released after video was leaked of his torture.
  • Interviews that follow one missing student’s family in their relentless search to find answers.

After Ayotzinapa was produced and reported by Diaz-Cortes and Doyle over a two-year period. It was edited by Taki Telonidis and originally aired in the United States in January 2022 on more than 580 public radio stations and across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and other major podcast platforms. 

About Después de Ayotzinapa

Adonde Media’s Después de Ayotzinapa is a six-part series hosted and produced by Olivia Zerón Tena. The senior producer and lead editor is Inger Díaz Barriga. The series is presented by Animal Político, a Mexican independent digital news publication. Adonde’s team also includes associate producer Carlos Sánchez, David Alandete as chief editor and Martina Castro as the executive producer.

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