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Mexican Prosecutor Says Mayor, Wife Ordered Attack On Students
by Carrie Kahn
Mexican Prosecutor Says Mayor Wife Ordered Attack On Students Parallels NPR
Attorney General Murillo Karam said investigators are still trying to positively identify the remains of some 30 bodies found in nine graves outside Iguala.
In the town Wednesday, angry protesters — many hooded — smashed windows and burned several offices at City Hall.
In Mexico City, students marched for hours, demanding justice and revenge.
Maria Fernanda Solis, an 18-year-old college student, said it's just outrageous how much corruption, collusion and impunity there is in Mexico.
"The government and the traffickers are one and the same," she said. "We have to stop it."
Many students dressed in black, like those from the music school at the National Autonomous University, asked: If the government kills students, what is left for the future of Mexico?
Still no knowledge of where they are
A drug ring that has been implicated in the disappearance has now pointed the finger at the mayor of the city of Iguala who allegedly ordered police to stop the students from protesting a speech that his wife was scheduled to give, according to the Associated Press. Now the mayor, his wife and the city’s police chief are reportedly on the run as the search for the students continues.
Here’s what we know:
Who are the students?
The 43 students who vanished on Sept. 26 were all enrolled at the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college, Fusion reports. According to the Associated Press, the school was known for its radical political stance and some of the students had been involved in demonstrations in the town before, earning the ire of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda, dubbed by some as “Lady Abarca.”
The mayor of the city of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, right, and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa meet with state government officials in Chilpancingo, Mexico.
Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said Wednesday that their investigation concluded that the mayor had ordered the police to detain the students after they were heading to a speech Pineda was scheduled to give. Fusion reports that the students were unarmed and some—with reports differing between three and four—students were killed when police opened fire on the buses.
Where were they taken? By whom?
Karam said that they were taken to a police station and then to the nearby town of Cocula. The Associated Press reported that the students were transferred into a dump truck at some point during this hand off, though they were believed to still be alive at this point. They were driven to an area at the outskirts of the city, near where mass graves have been discovered.
Demonstrators protest the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college in Acapulco, Guerrero state, Mexico.
The leader of a powerful local gang called Guerreros Unidos, or "United Warriors,” told investigators that the group of students were passed off to his gang by police, but they were told that they were members of a rival gang. The gang’s leader, Sidronio Casarrubias, was caught last week and has been helping authorities, but he has not said what happened to the group after they were turned over to the Guerreros Unidos.
Have the students been found?
Mexican mayor and his wife implicated in students' disappearance...
What We Know About the 43 Missing Mexican Students
Oct 24, 2014 ~ A Mexican mayor and his wife have been implicated in the controversy surrounding the disappearance of 43 students last month as authorities have revealed more details about the mystery.
A drug ring that has been implicated in the disappearance has now pointed the finger at the mayor of the city of Iguala who allegedly ordered police to stop the students from protesting a speech that his wife was scheduled to give, according to the Associated Press. Now the mayor, his wife and the city’s police chief are reportedly on the run as the search for the students continues.
Here’s what we know:
Who are the students?
The 43 students who vanished on Sept. 26 were all enrolled at the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college, Fusion reports. According to the Associated Press, the school was known for its radical political stance and some of the students had been involved in demonstrations in the town before, earning the ire of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda, dubbed by some as “Lady Abarca.”
The mayor of the city of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, right, and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa meet with state government officials in Chilpancingo, Mexico.
Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said Wednesday that their investigation concluded that the mayor had ordered the police to detain the students after they were heading to a speech Pineda was scheduled to give. Fusion reports that the students were unarmed and some—with reports differing between three and four—students were killed when police opened fire on the buses.
Where were they taken? By whom?
Karam said that they were taken to a police station and then to the nearby town of Cocula. The Associated Press reported that the students were transferred into a dump truck at some point during this hand off, though they were believed to still be alive at this point. They were driven to an area at the outskirts of the city, near where mass graves have been discovered.
Demonstrators protest the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college in Acapulco, Guerrero state, Mexico.
The leader of a powerful local gang called Guerreros Unidos, or "United Warriors,” told investigators that the group of students were passed off to his gang by police, but they were told that they were members of a rival gang. The gang’s leader, Sidronio Casarrubias, was caught last week and has been helping authorities, but he has not said what happened to the group after they were turned over to the Guerreros Unidos.
Have the students been found?
Atty. Gen. Jesus Murillo Karam indicated that information on the grave site came from four additional gang members who were captured over the weekend; two of them confessed to having had custody of a “large number” of the students, he said. Mexican and Argentine forensic experts are examining remains found at the site outside the town of Cocula “to corroborate” the testimony of the detained men, members of a local drug gang known as Guerreros Unidos, Murillo Karam told reporters. His lead investigator, Tomas Zeron, was at the site much of the day, witnesses said, fueling speculation that the long search for the students, who were last seen being led away by local police, had finally ended.
Relatives of the 43 missing students attend a Mass at the site where three students were killed Sept. 26 in Iguala, Guerrero state, Mexico
The students, from a rural college for peasant children aspiring to be teachers, went missing after being intercepted and attacked by local police from Iguala and Cocula, who initially opened fire on the students’ buses, killing six people. Murillo Karam has previously said Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca ordered the attack on the students, whom he feared would disrupt a party his wife was giving. The wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, is the sister of major drug cartel lieutenants, authorities say. Abarca and Pineda are fugitives and wanted for arrest; Murillo Karam on Monday gave no new information on leads to their whereabouts.
A total of 56 people have been arrested, including the most recent four. Most are local police officers, including one who authorities said confessed to killing or watching the slaying of several of the students. The Iguala case has outraged large segments of Mexican society and exposed, again, the way drug gangs and other criminal networks have penetrated government bodies and police agencies, ending in a collusion of profitable convenience among all concerned. The most recent grave at Cocula, about 10 miles south of Iguala, is the 11th to be uncovered since the students disappeared Sept. 26. A total of 38 bodies have been recovered, none identified as the students, according to authorities.
Mexican authorities determining whether remains are of missing students - LA Times
The gravediggers placed the bones in a black plastic bag and handed them to Galvan, who planned to cremate them and put the ashes in a small crypt the family bought in a church. "I've had to go through two difficult moments, first burying him and now unburying him," the 42-year-old carpenter said as he stood in the San Isidro cemetery in the Mexico City borough of Azcapotzalco.
Mexico's capital is rapidly running out of gravesites and many residents of this growing metropolis of 9 million people have to exhume the remains of their loved ones once the burial rights expire to make room for new bodies. Officials say there is no public land available for new cemeteries. The lack of cemetery space has prompted the city's legislative assembly to propose a law that would reduce the time a body can remain in a grave and encourage people to cremate the bodies of their love ones, a move that critics say will threaten Mexico's long and rich traditions surrounding burying and celebrating the dead.
Assemblywoman Polimnia Sierra, who proposed the law, said the city's 119 cemeteries only have 71,000 gravesites available and that each year about 30,000 people die in the capital. "In less than three years (the cemeteries) will be completely filled," said Sierra in defense of the law which was passed by the assembly this summer but sent back by Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera who wanted changes to its language. A vote on the revised law is expected soon. It would require that the city government educate people about cremation as an option and build more crematoriums - there are currently just two public crematoriums. It would also lower the maximum gravesite tenure from 21 years to 15 years, as long as cemetery rights are paid.
Complicating matters is that the regulations aren't applied consistently, with borough officials administering and sometimes setting their own grave time limits in the cemeteries in their areas. Sierra said there have been cases of cemeteries exhuming graves to bury someone else in as little as one year.
Once exhumed, families commonly put the remains in above-ground niches offered by the cemetery, cremate them, bury them in a different cemetery or if no one claims the remains, they are re-buried at the same grave but underneath the coffin and tombstone of the new body. While other countries around the world reuse graves, it is a sensitive issue in Mexico where celebrating the dead is still a living part of the culture.
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The announcement came as local media reported that a mass grave has been discovered in a trash dump outside mountain town of Cocula, near Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero, where 43 students disappeared after they clashed with police and masked men on Sept 26. Mexico's Attorney General Jesus Murillo said the four members of the Guerreros Unidos gang had been involved in the kidnapping of the students, which has sparked nationwide protests and undermined President Enrique Pena Nieto's claims that Mexico is becoming safer under his watch. "Today we now have those who organized the disappearance of these youths," Murillo said.
Relatives of missing students of the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College, Raul Isidro Burgos, participate in a march as they carry crosses with the names of three students who were killed during clashes with police in late September, in Iguala
He did not elaborate on the media reports of another mass grave site, but he said that the suspects had identified a crime scene where reporters would be taken on Tuesday. The attorney general has said Iguala's mayor and his wife were the probable masterminds of the disappearance and ordered local police forces to stop the students from disrupting a political event to launch a campaign for his wife to succeed him as mayor. Forensic anthropologists are still checking the remains of dozens of corpses found buried on a hillside outside Iguala, but so far none of the students' have been found.
Federal authorities have arrested more than 50 people in connection with the incident, including dozens of police who have links to the Guerreros Unidos gang, which translates as United Warriors. The disappearance of the students has triggered massive protests from Mexico City to the Pacific seaside resort of Acapulco, overshadowing Pena Nieto's bid to restore order in Mexico and shift the focus away from endemic gang violence and onto economic growth in Latin America's No. 2 economy. Around 100,000 people have been killed in gang-related violence since the start of 2007.
Mexico arrests four gang members in students disappearance Reuters
Gang-bangers arrested in missing students case...
Mexico arrests four gang members in students' disappearance
Mon Oct 27, 2014 - Mexican authorities on Monday said they had arrested four drug gang members involved in the kidnapping of dozens of student teachers who disappeared last month and are feared massacred.
The announcement came as local media reported that a mass grave has been discovered in a trash dump outside mountain town of Cocula, near Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero, where 43 students disappeared after they clashed with police and masked men on Sept 26. Mexico's Attorney General Jesus Murillo said the four members of the Guerreros Unidos gang had been involved in the kidnapping of the students, which has sparked nationwide protests and undermined President Enrique Pena Nieto's claims that Mexico is becoming safer under his watch. "Today we now have those who organized the disappearance of these youths," Murillo said.
Relatives of missing students of the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College, Raul Isidro Burgos, participate in a march as they carry crosses with the names of three students who were killed during clashes with police in late September, in Iguala
He did not elaborate on the media reports of another mass grave site, but he said that the suspects had identified a crime scene where reporters would be taken on Tuesday. The attorney general has said Iguala's mayor and his wife were the probable masterminds of the disappearance and ordered local police forces to stop the students from disrupting a political event to launch a campaign for his wife to succeed him as mayor. Forensic anthropologists are still checking the remains of dozens of corpses found buried on a hillside outside Iguala, but so far none of the students' have been found.
Federal authorities have arrested more than 50 people in connection with the incident, including dozens of police who have links to the Guerreros Unidos gang, which translates as United Warriors. The disappearance of the students has triggered massive protests from Mexico City to the Pacific seaside resort of Acapulco, overshadowing Pena Nieto's bid to restore order in Mexico and shift the focus away from endemic gang violence and onto economic growth in Latin America's No. 2 economy. Around 100,000 people have been killed in gang-related violence since the start of 2007.
Mexico arrests four gang members in students disappearance Reuters
Workers in protective gear focused on a 25-by-25 foot-square area below the ridge of the municipal dump in Cocula, a town in Guerrero state where police have been arrested and linked to the Sept. 26 disappearances. But authorities have not said so far how many bodies have been found or in what condition. Parents of the students say they were not even notified of the latest remains, discovered Monday based on the testimony of four new detainees in the case. "We're angry and very tired," said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, father of missing Cesar Manuel Gonzalez. "We have an overwhelming sense of helplessness."
A forensic examiner walks along a garbage-strewn hillside above a ravine where examiners are searching for human remains in densely forested mountains outside Cocula, Guerrero state, Mexico, Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2014. Suspects arrested this week told prosecutors that many of the 43 students who disappeared Sept. 26 from the town of Iguala had been held near this location.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said he has nothing concrete so far regarding the remains. "I prefer taking more time to find the truth than rushing to put out a guess, imagination or invention," he said in a press conference Tuesday. A parent who spoke on conditional of anonymity said the group would meet in Mexico City on Wednesday with President Enrique Pena Nieto. Murillo Karam said Monday that two of the detained suspects were members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel who handled the disappearances of the students. The two said they received a large group of people around Sept. 26, the date the students went missing. The arrests Monday put the total at 56 detainees so far in the case, yet there is still nothing concrete on the whereabouts of the students.
Journalists taken to the latest search site by authorities saw clothing but nothing resembling remains. It appeared that some debris on the hillside had fallen from the dump above. Workers were not digging, rather working the surface for clues. The rural teachers college students disappeared after an attack by police in nearby Iguala. Authorities say it was ordered by former Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and carried out by police working with the Guerreros Unidos cartel. Parents of the missing students and their allies are staging increasingly angry protests in the state capital, Chilpancingo, blocking roads and taking public buildings. "We aren't going to stop", said Manuel Martinez, a spokesman for the families.
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Mexican authorities searching for 43 missing college students have found human remains in a new area of southern Guerrero state and are testing to see if they belong to the young men who last were seen in police custody a month ago, a government official said on Monday. Authorities came upon the new location based on statements from four people who were arrested early on Monday, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. The new remains were found in Cocula, a town about 17km from where the students last were seen.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam confirmed the four arrests in a news conference, but made no mention of more remains or mass graves. He said some of those arrested could be members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel responsible for the actual disappearance of the students after an attack by local police. Two of the detainees said they received a large group of people around Sept. 26, the date the students went missing, Murillo Karam said. Investigators were trying to confirm their statements. Mexico now has a total of 56 people in custody in the case.
Relatives of 43 missing teachers’ college students on Monday attend a Mass at the site where three students were killed on Sept. 26 in Iguala, Guerrero State, Mexico.
The students from a rural teachers’ college disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala, a city about 130km southwest of Mexico City. Authorities say the attack was ordered by Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, who is being sought by officials, along with his wife and the city’s police chief. Murrillo Karam has said the local officers took the students to a police station and then to Cocula. At some point, they were loaded aboard a dump truck and taken, apparently still alive, to an area on the outskirts of Iguala, he said.
Authorities have mounted searches for the students, spurred by increasingly violent demonstrations that included the burning of Iguala’s city hall by protesters last week. Before Monday’s discovery, investigators had found a total of 11 clandestine graves containing 38 sets of human remains in the hills of Pueblo Viejo in the municipality of Iguala. Initial DNA testing of the remains determined the bodies were not those of the missing students and officials were waiting for results of second round of tests. The crime has shaken the country and drawn international criticism and protests for the involvement of officials and police.
Rogelio Ortega Martinez, a sociologist and former university administrator, was named interim governor of Guerrero state on Sunday, after former governor Angel Aguirre stepped down last week under heavy criticism of the state’s handling of the case and its political support of Abarca. The 59-year-old Ortega previously was secretary-general of Guerrero’s state public university and has close ties to the state’s ruling Democratic Revolution Party. He is a former social activist and the son of a rural schoolteacher.
More remains located in hunt for Mexican students - Taipei Times
Investigators have charged police in Iguala turned the students over to a drug gang. Mothers and fathers of the missing have grown increasingly frustrated at the pace of the investigation.
Flowers, candles, and dolls representing the Baby Jesus decorate an altar commemorating 43 missing students, at the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college in the Ayotzinapa neighborhood of Tixtla, Mexico, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2014. More than a month after the students disappeared, their classmates continue to organize protests and road blocks in Guerrero state. Classes remain on hold at the school, where classrooms have been converted to makeshift dormitories for hundreds of teachers and students from other schools who have come to support the students from Ayotzinapa.
They were inside the Los Pinos presidential residence for more than six hours Wednesday. At one point human rights officials said the meeting had concluded but the parents were refusing to leave until President Enrique Pena Nieto signed a document that would satisfy everyone.
Felipe de la Cruz later said the parents would appear at a news conference with reporters at a human rights center in the evening.
News from The Associated Press
But by the end of the day Tuesday, the result was the same as it has been for four weeks: no sign of life or death for the teacher trainees, who disappeared from the nearby town of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero. There are suspicions of human remains at the newest possible mass grave location in Cocula but no proof.
Mexico's Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said at a news conference on Tuesday that it was too early to call the newest site a "mass grave" and that experts are processing the scene. “We have statements that the groups that detained the students [then] gathered in that location, and that diverse actions were taken. We can't do anything until we have clear and complete evidence of what happened there," Murillo Karam told reporters.
Members of a forensic team search for human remains, near where a mass grave was discovered in a trash dump, outside the mountain town of Cocula, near Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero
This week marked one month since the students went missing on September 26-27 after they clashed with police under mysterious circumstances. Guerrero's new interim governor took a hopeful tone on Tuesday, offering to negotiate with "whomever is holding our 43 young [men]." "No one is above the law," added Rogelio Ortega, who was appointed to the position on Sunday after his predecessor resigned.
There has been speculation of a massacre, and nearly 60 police officers and gang members have been arrested in the case. Authorities allege Iguala's fugitive mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, ordered the attack to prevent the students from disturbing an event held by his wife.
Search Underway at New Site in Mexico Missing Students Case
Angry fathers of 43 Mexican students missing for the past month on Wednesday turned on Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, accusing his government of deceit, fostering impunity and bungling the search for their sons. Following a five-hour meeting with the president, relatives of the students abducted by police late last month in the southwestern city of Iguala dismissed his efforts to find the missing and said their patience was running out. The disappearances have become arguably the sternest challenge yet to face Pena Nieto, who took office two years ago vowing to restore order in Mexico, where close to 100,000 people have died in violence linked to organized crime since 2007.
Initial testimony from investigators suggested that the students, who belong to an all-male leftist college, had a history of conflict with the Iguala mayor and that the city police had handed them over to local gangsters who killed them. However, their fate remains unclear. “We’re not going to believe the president’s words and the pledges he made until the 43 students are presented to us alive,” one of the fathers, Felipe de la Cruz, told a news conference late on Wednesday after meeting Pena Nieto. “With all the power the state has, they can’t find our boys. We’re not going to believe in this deceit,” he added. Both the mayor of Iguala and his wife have gone on the run. Dozens of arrests have been made and at least 38 bodies have been dug up in the hills around the city, but so far none have been identified as those of the missing students.
Relatives of the 43 missing students from Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College Raul Isidro Burgos take part in a news conference in Mexico City.
Minutes before the relatives lined up in front of cameras, many of them clutching placards emblazoned with faces of the students, Pena Nieto made a televised address in which he pledged to redouble efforts to find the missing youths. “There will not be the slightest room for impunity,” the president said. “We must apply the law whoever it affects.” Security forces have combed the area around Iguala in search of the students, whose disappearance has sparked massive protest marches in Mexico. The row has also prompted the governor of the surrounding state of Guerrero to step down.
Another of the fathers, Epifanio Alvarez, said the talks on Wednesday had left the families feeling desperate. “This meeting is just like the others we’ve had with the attorney general and the interior minister: it’s the same as always. There really is no answer from anyone,” he said. Emiliano Navarrete, also one of the fathers, was more blunt. “What fills me with rage are the actions of the government, because it’s supposed to help us,” he said. The problem, said de la Cruz, was the government’s failure to stamp out political corruption. “There’s impunity in the government, not just in Guerrero; there’s impunity in municipal, state and federal governments,” he said. “Because we know that many of them are involved with organized crime too.”
Fathers of missing slam Mexican leader - Taipei Times
Tamaulipas state investigator Raul Galindo Vira would only confirm that four bodies had been recovered and declined to discuss who they might be. A second state official said investigators were trying to determine if the dead include three siblings from Progreso, Texas, who disappeared with a fourth person on Oct. 13. The official, who said the bodies were badly decomposed, insisted on speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak to the press. Authorities on Wednesday asked the siblings’ father what they were wearing when they disappeared, mother Raquel Alvarado told reporters.
Alvarado said witnesses saw armed men take her daughter, Erica Alvarado Rivera, 26, and her sons, Alex, 22, and Jose Angel, 21, in El Control, a small town near the Texas border west of Matamoros. The three were visiting their father in Mexico. According to Alvarado, her daughter, Erica, mother of four children aged three to nine, drove her black Jeep Cherokee across the US-Mexico border on Oct. 12 and dropped it at her father’s house in El Control. Erica visited her boyfriend there and the next morning called her brothers to ask them to bring the Cherokee to a roadside restaurant where the couple was eating, and three siblings planned to return to Progreso together from there, Avarado said.
When Alex and Jose Angel Alvarado arrived to pick up their sister, they saw men “pushing their sister and her boyfriend and hitting her,” Raquel Alvarado said. The brothers tried to intervene, witnesses said, but were taken away with their sister and her boyfriend. Witnesses said the armed men identified themselves as Grupo Hercules, a police security unit for Matamoros city officials, and were traveling in military style trucks. She said witnesses also saw federal highway police, “but no one did anything.” The Matamoros mayor’s office and a city spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.
As night fell Wednesday, Martha Hernandez, who raised 32-year-old Jose Guadalupe Castaneda Benitez, Erica Alvarado’s boyfriend, since he was three, waited outside state police offices in Matamoros for any word on his whereabouts. She said no one had told her until she arrived that four bodies had been found. Hernandez said a friend who saw Castaneda and the Alvarados being picked up also told her the Hercules unit was responsible, and she expressed anger at the Matamoros mayor. “We will keep searching,” she said. “They can’t just disappear. We are going to be like in Guerrero.” Hernandez was referring to Guerrero state, where the disappearance of 43 students on Sept. 26 has touched off a national controversy in Mexico.
Bodies found near where US siblings were seized - Taipei Times
On the night of September 26, three separate groups were met with violence on a Mexican highway. There was a third-division football team, the Avispones of Chilpancingo, on their way home from a match. There was a single woman in a taxi. And there was a convoy of buses that was eventually due to transport teacher-trainees from Ayotzinapa College to a peaceful demonstration in Mexico City. In a sudden encounter with police forces from the state of Guerrero, the footballers' coach driver was shot dead. A 15 year-old player, David Josué García Evangelista, died from gunshot wounds too. ("They're children!" shouted the team's trainer, as 400 bullets hit the bus.) The woman in the taxi, Blanca Montiel Sánchez, died in the crossfire. And in a massacre that stretched to the city of Iguala, where the Mayor's politically ambitious wife was hosting a party, at least four of the students were murdered, and 43 more went missing.
One month on, none of those 43 first-year Ayotzinapa students – bright pupils for whom college was a way out of rural poverty – has been found. The Governor of Guerrero has resigned under pressure, and the Mayor of Iguala and his wife are on the run. All over Mexico, banners, walls and chalk-inscribed pavements bear the same demand: "They were taken alive. We want them back alive." The world has begun to take notice: the slogan #TodosSomosAyotzinapa (We Are All Ayotzinapa) has gathered momentum on social media. But that idea – that this is about more than just a small corner of a troubled nation, that international forces are at work, that we all have a right to know what happened and why – still needs to gather more force.
A girl holds a candle during a protest for the 43 missing students of the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College Raul Isidro Burgos, in Chilpancingo
When I was growing up in Mexico, words such as "narcofosa" – a clandestine grave dug by traffickers – didn't exist. Returning there now, it's hard not to be struck by the transformation of the language. A "narcofosa" discovered in the state of Veracruz a few days before I arrived was the fifth found there this year, only one of which had been officially acknowledged by the government. The words "balacera", "secuestro", "enfrentamiento armado" – gunfight, kidnapping, armed confrontation – have become part of everyday vocabulary, as have, inevitably, "asesinados" and "desaparecidos". They have acquired a horrible poetry by force of repetition – in fact, one of the country's best journalists, John Gibler, wrote a book entitled Veinte poemas para ser leídos en una balacera – "20 Poems to be Read in a Gunfight". There is a new rhythm to the nation's speech.
It is no longer possible to believe, as many Mexicans have for years, that the "narcos", the drug traffickers, just kill each other. The entire country is caught in the crossfire – if "crossfire" is the correct expression for a series of executions in which the government and the traffickers are not always on opposite sides. Such prolonged denial has been possible because the dissemination of accurate information about any of it is notoriously difficult: the Mexican human rights organisation Article 19 has registered 157 attacks on journalists in the first half of this year alone – and 43 per cent of those, they say, were committed by people working for the government.
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Officials said they are looking into a witness statement that the abductors identified themselves as part of the "Hercules" group, an elite public security unit that patrols the Tamaulipas state frontier with the United States. The state prosecutor said nine members of the team are being questioned.
Tamaulipas state prosecutor Ismael Quintanilla Acosta said Thursday that the victims' hands and feet had been tied, and they had been shot in the head the same day they were kidnapped, October 13.
Raquel Alvarado is comforted as she talks about her three children, Erica Maria Alvarado Rivera, Alex Rivera, and Jose Angel Rivera, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2014, in Progreso, Texas who were found dead near Matamoros, Mexico after visiting El Control.
The deaths of Erica Alvarado Rivera, 26, her brothers, Alex, 22, and Jose Angel, 21, and her 32-year-old boyfriend, Jose Guadalupe Castaneda Benitez, as they traveled to visit family is the third high-profile case in recent months that links security forces to extrajudicial killings. Dozens of police have been arrested in the state of Guerrero in connection with the disappearance of 43 students in late September.
And according to a National Commission on Human Rights report released last week, in June the army killed 22 suspected gang members in Mexico state and then altered the scene and intimidated witnesses to hide the fact that most were executed after they surrendered. Three soldiers face murder charges.
Mexico Police Investigate Police Link in Shooting Deaths of US Siblings
As other posters have already stated the Gov't is corrupt.............those that aren't corrupt and decide to fight are threatened, as are their families...........same for the military.............
Anyone who opposes them is killed along with their entire families...............
The only way it ends..........is if the people as a whole say ENOUGH and stand together to end this.............The casualties in Mexico now exceed the War in Syria.
