Zenyazen Roberto Escobar García, a 42-year-old federal deputy for Mexico’s governing Morena party, was found dead on Friday, September 4, 2026, in the eastern state of Veracruz, his body inside a black Mercedes-Benz stopped on the shoulder of the Xalapa-Veracruz highway. Investigators counted at least one gunshot wound to the head, and what killed him has not been established.
A motorist called in the parked car on the shoulder of Federal Highway 140 near Chichicaxtle, and the body turned up in the community of La Gloria, in the municipality of Puente Nacional. Prosecutors, forensic experts and Ministerial Police officers worked the scene. Confirmation of the death came from Veracruz state Attorney General Lisbeth Aurelia Jiménez, who said the investigation file was being compiled but gave no further detail.
The lawmaker’s vehicle showed no signs of violence, Veracruz Secretary of Government Ricardo Ahued Bardahuil said at a news conference. “It wasn’t an attack, because the car is off to the side,” Ahued said, adding that he did not want to get ahead of an investigation still under way. A black firearm sat inside the Mercedes-Benz C-Class in footage aired by Mexican news television. Escobar had been traveling without bodyguards, according to early reports, though the post he held usually meant he had company.
What the Investigation Has Yet to Answer
Because Escobar held federal office, an announcement on X from Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) said the agency was assuming control of the case. Claudia Sheinbaum, on a tour of San Luis Potosí, told reporters she had asked the office to report as the investigation advances. Investigators were pursuing several lines of inquiry, Veracruz Gov. Rocío Nahle said on September 5, urging the public to wait for the FGR’s report; she would not say why a security checkpoint previously installed in the Tamarindo area had been removed. On the local program “En Contacto” two days later, on September 7, Nahle said the door locks on the Mercedes-Benz had been engaged, leaving it locked from the inside, that a single bullet was involved and that one casing was recovered inside the car. Forensic and ballistic analyses were under way, she said, repeating her call for the public not to speculate.
Pathologists completed an autopsy in the early hours of Saturday, September 5. By September 7 the results remained unpublished, no official notification had reached the family, and the FGR had delivered no conclusion about the way Escobar died. It has not been disclosed whether ballistics, trajectory or telephone analyses have been completed, nor has anyone said if cameras or witnesses recorded the minutes leading up to it. The family would wait for the autopsy findings before discussing the circumstances, Escobar’s widow, magistrate Liliana López Coronado, told local media, and she asked that her husband be remembered for his work in the teaching movement.
Farewells in Xalapa and Río Blanco
Mourners gathered for Escobar on September 5 at the Bosques del Recuerdo funeral home in Xalapa, among them Nahle, former Gov. Cuitláhuac García Jiménez, relatives, party members and union groups. Nahle and Cuitláhuac García had not appeared publicly together since December 2024, making this their first such occasion. Mourners set a white cowboy hat on the casket, a nod to the one Escobar wore in the Chamber of Deputies.
He was buried in the rain on September 6 at the municipal cemetery in Río Blanco. A Facebook post by Cuitláhuac García, to whose inner circle Escobar belonged, said he deeply mourned a friend and fellow party member with whom he had shared years of struggle and work for the people of Veracruz. Condolences on social media from Ricardo Monreal, Morena’s floor leader in the Chamber of Deputies, went to Escobar’s family, staff and associates; Monreal called the death a loss for the parliamentary group and for the district the deputy represented. The lower house of Congress urged judicial authorities to conduct a thorough investigation.
Parliamentary group leaders had agreed against creating a special commission to investigate the death and would wait for the FGR to establish what happened, Monreal, who chairs the chamber’s Political Coordination Board, said on September 8. A formal tribute followed instead in the chamber on September 9, opening with a minute of silence and closing with a minute of applause, with Escobar’s widow, daughters, mother and sister at the foot of the rostrum. The deaths in its ranks had made the 66th Legislature the most violent since post-revolutionary Mexico, Movimiento Ciudadano deputy Sergio Gil Rullán, who also represents Veracruz, told the floor. The death could not be left in the realm of versions and speculation, PRI deputy Lorena Piñón said.
From Telesecundaria Classrooms to Congress
Escobar was born June 4, 1984. He earned a degree in communication sciences from the Universidad de Sotavento and a master’s in education sciences, took up school supervision work for state telesecundarias in 2007 and taught in Veracruz classrooms from 2009. In 2015 he joined Educación, Resistencia y Dignidad Magisterial, a movement linked to the dissident teachers’ union CNTE, and emerged as leader of the Movimiento Magisterial Popular Veracruzano, which opposed the federal education reform.
He entered the Veracruz state congress in 2016 and coordinated Morena’s caucus there, then was named state secretary of education in December 2018 under Cuitláhuac García. In 2024 he won a seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies for Veracruz’s 16th district, based in Córdoba. For years he was also dogged by images from his early adulthood, said to show him offering private dances under the name “Tarzán Boy” in bars around Orizaba. Escobar denied having worked as a stripper, telling an internet interviewer in October 2017 that he had spent 11 years in bodybuilding and fitness.
Escobar drew national attention on May 28 by confronting Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) deputy Carlos Gutiérrez Mancilla on the floor of the Chamber during an extraordinary session, in a video that spread widely online. Gutiérrez Mancilla shouted an insult referring to those old images, and Escobar removed his hat and took a fighting stance before other deputies separated them. PRI deputy Ana Isabel González asked that Escobar take a drug test, a request opposition legislators backed on suspicion he had been drinking. Monreal denied that Escobar was drunk and attributed his behavior to exhaustion after the marathon session. The Chamber reported no sanctions.
A Violent Backdrop Before the 2027 Vote
The death lands as Mexico heads toward elections on June 6, 2027, that will renew mayoral, state legislative, city council and gubernatorial posts. A human rights organization recorded at least 30 incidents of “political-criminal violence” across 11 states in July, including 14 homicides, and defines the category as threats, murders, armed attacks, assassination attempts, disappearances and kidnappings. Veracruz deputy Benito Aguas Atlahua, of the same legislature, was shot in the Sierra de Zongolica in December 2024 and died hours later.
President Claudia Sheinbaum, asked about the case at her morning news conference on September 10, 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. No cause of death had been announced publicly as of that date, and no arrest had been made.
