The disappearance of 43 students in Mexico's Guerrero state, youngsters widely believed to have been abducted and murdered by drug cartel gunmen, prompted the resignation of state governor Angel Aguirre last week.
Aguirre’s departure and the arrest of the leader of the local “Guerreros Unidos” (United Warriors) cartel offered a brief respite to President Enrique Peña Nieto, who faces growing protests by outraged relatives.
Since Peña assumed office in December 2012, he has worked hard to replace headlines about mass murder with tales of economic achievement.
Although there has been a small decline in murder figures, little has changed in areas affected by violence, and kidnappings are on the rise. According to Mexico’s national statistics institute (INEGI), there were 105,682 kidnappings last year but only 1,317 were reported to police.
The missing students were returning home from Iguala city last month when their bus was attacked by police, resulting in six deaths. In the days that followed, state officials reassured frantic parents that the students had gone into hiding but a shallow grave was soon discovered containing the remains of more than 30 people. Tests on those remains are so far inconclusive.
The local mayor, his wife and the police chief went into hiding. The search for the students is a painful trawl through Mexico’s killing fields, where one unmarked grave leads to another containing dozens of victims of an undeclared war. While relatives pray that loved ones may yet be found alive it seems certain the youths, aged 17 to 23, are dead.
Angry fellow students torched the town hall in Iguala last week and occupied 23 of the 81 mayoral offices in the area, threatening further action should the case remain unsolved. The crisis edges closer to Mexico City, where mass rallies, faculty shutdowns and street barricades look set to intensify.
Meanwhile Mexico’s attorney general confirmed last week that on June 30th last year army troops shot dead 15 civilians in cold blood before tampering with the crime scene to make it look like the victims died in crossfire.
‘The punisher’
Army involvement in law enforcement got off to a bad start in 1996 when Mexican general Jesus Rebollo, nicknamed “the punisher” by Bill Clinton’s anti-drug tsar, was appointed to tackle organised crime. A year later he was behind bars, convicted of involvement with the drug mafia, sentenced to 40 years.
The twin massacres cap a decade of infamy in which children have perished inside creches, journalists have been decapitated and migrants forced to dig their own graves. An estimated 100,000 people have died, while 25,000 remain unaccounted for as the level of collusion between police, army, politicians and drug traffickers has reached epidemic proportions.
The case of the missing students gained even greater prominence last week when a number of sicarios or hired gunmen were arrested and outlined the modus operandi of police and cartel killers. The students were apparently arrested by police and handed over to "El Chuky", leader of the United Warriors.
The gunmen said they had been executed, their bodies piled together, doused with petrol, set alight and buried in shallow graves. In similar cases bodies might not be discovered for months or years, if at all.
In a further development, the top leader of the cartel was detained last week and he outlined the apparent motive behind the student disappearances: José Luis Abarca Velázquez, fugitive ex-mayor, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, were the left and right hands of the United Warriors cartel. Abarca Velázquez controlled local police while his wife commanded the sicarios.
Pineda had decided to run for mayor in 2015 to replace her outgoing husband. On the day in question, September 26th, she planned her first public event on the campaign trail in Iguala. The students who arrived in the city that day were active opponents of the mayor, whom they accused of direct involvement in the killing of two students in 2011.
‘Deal with them’
According to signed confessions by two of the gunmen, mafia lookouts warned the mayor that the students had arrived. The response, they said, was: “deal with them”. The students were treated as cartel enemies, their fate sealed.
In Mexico the body count rises and the government responds by throwing federal troops at the latest atrocity zone. The formation of armed civilian self-defence groups in areas affected by violence has heightened tension and led to further confrontation with security forces and cartel gunmen.
Government initiatives to combat the influence of cartels are announced with fanfare but quickly fizzle out as the will to enforce meets the impenetrable edifice of collusion and corruption. The “narco state” has devoured centre, right and left along the political spectrum, all sucked into the poisonous web of complicity.
The occasional arrest or killing of a high profile drug leader (such as that of Hector Beltran Leyva earlier this month) is a token offering which simply hands the business to more ruthless associates. The United Warriors itself arose from the ashes of the cartel run by Hector’s brother, Arturo Beltran Leyva, shot dead in 2009.
The missing students had been planning to travel to Mexico City to participate in activities commemorating the October 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco square when Mexican troops opened fire on protesting students, killing more than 100. That massacre crushed the growing pro-democracy movement, which then re-emerged in the wake of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake as citizens took charge of the rescue effort.
The broad-based citizen movement united around Cuauhtemoc Cardenas's candidacy in the 1988 presidential elections and appeared to unseat the PRI but a suspicious computer collapse altered initial results and Carlos Salinas was declared president.
The Salinas era saw the unprecedented expansion of the drug trade in parallel with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, cementing drugs and business as Mexico’s chief power blocs.
The trail of destruction wrought by drug violence is intimately connected to a political system which worships finance and turns a blind eye to corruption and money-laundering.
Mexico’s so-called drug war has failed to dent the powerful industry and politicians lack all appetite to follow the money trail, fearing perhaps that such a policy might lead straight back to their own door.
