Zenyazen Roberto Escobar García, 42, a Mexican federal deputy for the governing Morena party, was found dead of a gunshot wound inside his black Mercedes-Benz on Friday, September 4, 2026, pulled onto the shoulder of the Xalapa-Veracruz highway in the eastern state of Veracruz. Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) addressed the case on September 10, saying the file remains open while its principal lines of investigation point to a death by suicide.
A passing motorist reported the car stopped on the shoulder of Federal Highway 140 near Chichicaxtle. The body was found in the community of La Gloria, in the municipality of Puente Nacional, where prosecutors, forensic experts and Ministerial Police processed the scene. Veracruz Attorney General Lisbeth Aurelia Jiménez Aguirre confirmed the death and said the investigation file was being compiled, but offered no further detail.
At a news conference, Veracruz Secretary of Government Ricardo Ahued Bardahuil said the lawmaker’s vehicle showed no signs of attack. “It wasn’t an attack, because the car is off to the side. There’s no sign of major damage to the vehicle — it was internal,” Ahued said, adding that he did not want to get ahead of an investigation still under way, and that the FGR would lead it. A firearm was recovered inside the car. Escobar was traveling without the bodyguards who usually accompanied him.
Open Questions in the Investigation
Because Escobar held federal office, the FGR took the case over immediately. Veracruz Gov. Rocío Nahle said on September 5 that investigators were pursuing several lines of inquiry and urged the public to wait for the federal report. Two days later she told the local program “En Contacto” that the car had been locked from the inside with its door locks engaged, that a single bullet was involved and that one casing was recovered inside it.
Medical examiners completed an autopsy in the early hours of September 5. The FGR’s Veracruz federal office carried out more than 150 investigative acts, inspections and expert examinations with the state prosecutor’s office, drawing on ballistics, genetics and toxicology reports and interviews with people close to him. All of it pointed to a suicide, the FGR said on September 10, though its own wording was careful: the principal lines of investigation advance, coincide and point toward a death by suicide, and it would not rule out other motives. Escobar’s widow, the family court magistrate Liliana López Coronado, told local media the family would wait for the findings, asking that he be remembered for his teaching-movement work.
Mourned in Xalapa and Río Blanco
Mourners gathered for Escobar on September 5 at the Bosques del Recuerdo funeral home in Xalapa — Nahle, former Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez, family, party members and union groups among them. On the casket, mourners placed a white cowboy hat, a nod to the hat Escobar wore in the Chamber of Deputies.
He was buried in the rain on September 6 at the municipal cemetery in Río Blanco. Cuitláhuac García, to whose inner circle Escobar belonged, wrote on Facebook that he deeply mourned a friend and fellow party member with whom he had shared years of struggle and work for the people of Veracruz. Ricardo Monreal, Morena’s floor leader and chair of the chamber’s Political Coordination Board, called the death a loss for the parliamentary group and the district Escobar represented, and said on September 7 that parliamentary leaders had agreed against a special commission and would wait for the FGR. The chamber held a formal tribute on September 9, opening with a minute of silence and closing with a minute of applause, while his widow, daughters, mother and sister stood at the foot of the rostrum. Sergio Gil Rullán, a Movimiento Ciudadano deputy who also represents Veracruz, told the floor that the deaths in its ranks had made the 66th Legislature the most violent since post-revolutionary Mexico.
From Telesecundaria Teacher to Congress
Escobar was born June 4, 1984. He took a communication sciences degree from the Universidad de Sotavento and a master’s in education sciences, supervised state telesecundarias from 2007 and taught in Veracruz classrooms from 2009. In 2015 he joined a movement linked to the dissident teachers’ union CNTE and emerged as a leader of the Veracruz teachers’ movement opposing the federal education reform. He entered the state congress in 2016 and coordinated Morena’s caucus there; in 2018 Cuitláhuac García named him state secretary of education. In 2024 he won Veracruz’s 16th district, based in Córdoba.
He drew national attention just three months before his death, when he faced off with PRI deputy Carlos Gutiérrez Mancilla in the Chamber on May 28, in a scene that spread widely online. Gutiérrez Mancilla shouted an insult; Escobar stood and took a fighting stance before other deputies separated them. Monreal denied that Escobar was drunk, attributing his behavior to exhaustion after the marathon session.
A Violent Backdrop Before the 2027 Vote
Mexico votes on June 6, 2027, to renew thousands of state and local posts, and the death comes as that campaign approaches. Votar entre Balas, a political violence monitor run by Data Cívica, México Evalúa and Animal Político, counted 30 incidents of political-criminal violence in July alone, 14 of them homicides. Federal deputy Benito Aguas Atlahua, a Green Party member of the same legislature, was shot in the Sierra de Zongolica on December 9, 2024, and died hours later.
At her morning news conference on September 10, President Claudia Sheinbaum said the prosecutor’s office would have to be the one to report, and that it already had some results. “Our condolences to the family and to all the friends and colleagues,” she added. The FGR released its findings later that day.
Nahle returned to the case on September 14, dismissing unsigned reports that toll-booth cameras had shown Escobar accompanied. Escobar’s alternate, Ángel Etiem Jiménez Castañeda, was sworn in the same day to serve out the District 16 term. Nothing further has been announced in the three days since.