This article situates the dramatic case of the forced disappearance of forty‐three peasant and indigenous students from the teachers college, Ayotzinapa, in the city of Iguala, in Guerrero, on September 26, 2014, in a broader context of state violence in Mexico. What are the forces that operate to classify indigenous and peasant lives as waste, hence rendering permissible such atrocities? The article draws on ethnographic evidence collected over six years in La Montaña, Guerrero, Mexico. It points to the racialized spatial forms of governance that articulate state security punitive measures, to neoliberal antipoverty programs, and to the social imaginaries that represent indigenous regions as inherently backward, violent, and ingrained with cultural deficiencies. Drawing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism, this article argues that the effects of these racialized geographies engender the conditions for the permissibility of state‐sanctioned death.