In a story that gets worse and
worse, fourteen more police officers have been arrested in Guerrero State,
south of Mexico City – bringing the total of those arrested to 50 – with still
no sign of the 43 missing teaching-college students who went missing in late
September.
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| Mass for missing students |
For those who are not up-to-date
on the story, in late September, local police in Iguala, Guerrero State, opened
fire on about 100 teaching college students who had been part of a
demonstration in Guerrero, and who had hijacked a buses to get home. While no one thinks it was a grand idea to
hijack buses to get home from a massive demonstration, police opening fire on the
students was nowhere near an appropriate response. Six people were killed, and 25 injured, while
dozens were rounded up by police. 43 have remained missing.
About a week ago, the Mexican
Federal Police, who came in to assert some order, took one of the arrested
local policemen who had confessed to the location of mass graves on a remote
mountainside. This was a location that
no one knew about. It seemed a
promising, though macabre, lead.
Forensic investigators traveled to the site and unearthed nine mass
graves. Family members of the missing students gave cheek-swabs of DNA to try
to match them to the badly burned remains in the mass graves. None matched up,
leading the world to wonder who else was murdered and what else was going on in
Guerrero. Now a tenth mass grave has
been unearthed, and 14 more police officers, from the town of Cocula, a
neighboring town from the original town of Iguala where the massacre of the
student-buses occurred.
According the Guardian, both the mayor and police chief of Iguala are
fugitives and are accused of links to the local drug cartel, Guerrero.
The protests that have followed
the killing and disappearance of the students have not been peaceful. On protestors smashed windows of the state
capital building and set fire to buildings. The next day, the protests were peaceful
again. Rage remains. Bodies keep being found. Students are still
missing. Mexico continues to fight its
drug cartels.
Photo and underlying story credit TheGuardian.com
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