Zenyazen Roberto Escobar García, 42, a Mexican federal deputy for the governing Morena party, was found dead 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, with at least one gunshot wound to the head. 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.
The first alert came from a motorist who saw 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 officers processed the scene. Confirmation of the death came from Veracruz state Attorney General Lisbeth Aurelia Jiménez, who 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 violence. “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. “There are no signs of major damage to the vehicle,” he said, and he said Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office would lead the investigation into the death. According to the FGR account, Escobar was found with a firearm between his legs inside the Mercedes-Benz; images shown by Mexican news television showed him slightly slumped in the driver’s seat of the C-Class with a black firearm tucked between his legs. Bodyguards usually accompanied Escobar because of his office, but early reports noted that he was traveling without them.
Open Questions in the Investigation
Because Escobar held federal office, the FGR announced on X that it was taking over the case. The agency, headed by Ernestina Godoy, said on September 10 that it had assumed the case from the first moment because it involved the death of a sitting federal legislator, and that the safeguarding, collection, securing, registration and analysis of evidence were carried out in strict accordance with regulations and protocols, with ministerial police, experts, analysts and prosecutors taking part. On a tour of San Luis Potosí, President Claudia Sheinbaum said 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, when she urged the public to wait for the FGR’s report. On September 7, two days after that, Nahle told the local program “En Contacto” that the Mercedes-Benz had been locked from the inside with its door locks engaged, that a single bullet was involved and that one casing was recovered inside the car.
Medical examiners completed an autopsy in the early hours of Saturday, September 5. Forensic, ballistic, genetic and toxicological examinations, together with interviews with people close to Escobar, pointed to suicide, the FGR said on September 10, adding that it would not rule out other motives as the investigation continues. Its Veracruz federal office, part of the Fiscalía Especializada de Control Regional (FECOR), carried out more than 150 investigative acts, inspections and expert examinations in coordination with the Veracruz state prosecutor’s office, drawing on a multidisciplinary team from the FGR’s Centro Federal Pericial Forense whose reports covered medicine, criminalistics, forensic ballistics, genetics, forensic chemistry, lofoscopy, forensic photography, informatics, land traffic, field criminalistics and toxicology. The office also said it had prioritized the attention, respect and protection of the indirect victims of the event, who it said collaborated in a decisive way with the investigations. The family would hold off on discussing the circumstances until the autopsy findings were in, Escobar’s widow, magistrate Liliana López Coronado, told local media, and she asked that her husband be remembered for what he did in the teaching movement.
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. Nahle and Cuitláhuac García had not appeared publicly together since December 2024, making this the first such occasion since then. On the casket, mourners placed a white cowboy hat, a nod to the hat Escobar wore in the Chamber of Deputies.
Rain fell on his burial on September 6 at the municipal cemetery in Río Blanco. A Facebook message from 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. Ricardo Monreal, Morena’s floor leader in the Chamber of Deputies, used a social media message to send condolences to Escobar’s family, staff and associates, calling the death a loss for the parliamentary group and for the district he represented. Monreal, who chairs the chamber’s Political Coordination Board, said on September 8 that a special commission to investigate the death would not be created, an agreement reached by parliamentary group leaders who would instead wait for the FGR to establish what happened. A formal tribute filled that space in the chamber on September 9, opening with a minute of silence and closing with a minute of applause, while Escobar’s 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, and Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) deputy Lorena Piñón said the death could not be left in the realm of versions and speculation.
From Telesecundaria Teacher 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. His career started in school supervision for state telesecundarias in 2007, and he 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 arrived in the Veracruz state congress in 2016 and went on to coordinate Morena’s caucus there; in December 2018, Cuitláhuac García named him state secretary of education. In 2024 he won a seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies for Veracruz’s 16th district, based in Córdoba. Images from his early adulthood dogged him for years, 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.
A floor confrontation brought him national attention on May 28, when he faced off with PRI deputy Carlos Gutiérrez Mancilla in the Chamber during an extraordinary session and video of the scene spread widely online. Gutiérrez Mancilla shouted an insult referring to those old images; 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, attributing his behavior to exhaustion after the marathon session. The Chamber reported no sanctions.
A Violent Backdrop Before the 2027 Vote
Mexico votes on June 6, 2027, to renew mayoral, state legislative, city council and gubernatorial posts, and the death comes as that campaign approaches. A human rights organization recorded at least 30 incidents of “political-criminal violence” across 11 states in July 2026, 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.
Asked about the case at her morning news conference on September 10, 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 that afternoon.