# 43 Missing Students, 1 Missing Mayor: Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico



## Coyote

Pretty unbelievable - this isn't some far off over seas country - this is right next door.  And we complain about corruption?

43 students murdered and interred in mass graves.

Elected officials working in collussion with drug gangs and cartels to facilitate this mass murder.

Unbelievable.  The poor families 

43 Missing Students 1 Missing Mayor Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico Parallels NPR



> On the second story of the municipal palace in Iguala, Mexico, Mayor Jose Luis Abarca occupied the large corner office. His wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, head of the city's family welfare department, occupied the one right next door. From there, residents say, the two ruthlessly ruled over this city of 150,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. A national newspaper dubbed the duo the "imperial couple."
> 
> But on Sept. 30, their reign ended. The mayor, with his wife by his side, asked the city council for a leave of absence. Neither has been seen since.
> 
> That happened four days after 43 university students disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala. *Twenty-eight bodies — thought to be some of the missing students — were discovered in a nearby mass grave a week ago. More mass graves were discovered Friday.*
> 
> The case highlights the corruption and collusion between politicians and drug traffickers in many parts of rural Mexico today.
> 
> Residents say Iguala changed under the current Mayor Abarca's tenure.
> 
> "Crime has been terrible since Jose Luis Abarca took over," says Claudia Guitierrez, a 20-year-old law student. "Iguala was never like this before."
> 
> These days Mexico's new paramilitary gendarmerie patrols Iguala's streets. Twenty-two local cops are under arrest, four are fugitives, and the remainder of the force was relieved of duty.
> 
> Authorities say that on Sept. 26, *officers shot at three buses of students from a poor, rural teaching college who had come into town soliciting donations. After the shooting, with six people dead, the local cops were seen corralling the surviving students into patrol cars. Reportedly some of the officers confessed to turning the students over to a local drug gang, which later killed them.*
> 
> Authorities say they don't have a motive yet, but focus has centered on Iguala's mayor and his wife, who have well-known connections to traffickers.


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## Vigilante

Just par for the Regime, another fuck up catching up to them....


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## Mr. H.

I heard a good broadcast on this subject today on NPR. 
That's one fucked up country. 
And we're not far behind...


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## Coyote

That's where I heard it too Mr. H - I get a lot of my news on NPR radio when I'm driving.


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## Mr. H.

Coyote said:


> That's where I heard it too Mr. H - I get a lot of my news on NPR radio when I'm driving.


I don't suppose Miss Daisy is in the back seat.


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## Coyote

Mr. H. said:


> Coyote said:
> 
> 
> 
> That's where I heard it too Mr. H - I get a lot of my news on NPR radio when I'm driving.
> 
> 
> 
> I don't suppose Miss Daisy is in the back seat.
Click to expand...


No...it's Miss Rosalee


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## pismoe

sometime NPR is pretty interesting .    Mexico is messed up , has been for a long time .   I was there once and left Tijuana as soon as I saw that its pretty messed up . Trip into Mexico lasted about 3 hours and consisted of driving over the border , turning around and getting the heck out .   I spent a couple of hours inching along in traffic as I left Mexico .    I saw what looked like beggars along the exit way and they were selling Chinese trinkets , it was funny and messed up .  A Mexican guy that I knew [ LUIS ] told me , he said , hey , Mexico is the third world .


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## ChrisL

Coyote said:


> Pretty unbelievable - this isn't some far off over seas country - this is right next door.  And we complain about corruption?
> 
> 43 students murdered and interred in mass graves.
> 
> Elected officials working in collussion with drug gangs and cartels to facilitate this mass murder.
> 
> Unbelievable.  The poor families
> 
> 43 Missing Students 1 Missing Mayor Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico Parallels NPR
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On the second story of the municipal palace in Iguala, Mexico, Mayor Jose Luis Abarca occupied the large corner office. His wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, head of the city's family welfare department, occupied the one right next door. From there, residents say, the two ruthlessly ruled over this city of 150,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. A national newspaper dubbed the duo the "imperial couple."
> 
> But on Sept. 30, their reign ended. The mayor, with his wife by his side, asked the city council for a leave of absence. Neither has been seen since.
> 
> That happened four days after 43 university students disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala. *Twenty-eight bodies — thought to be some of the missing students — were discovered in a nearby mass grave a week ago. More mass graves were discovered Friday.*
> 
> The case highlights the corruption and collusion between politicians and drug traffickers in many parts of rural Mexico today.
> 
> Residents say Iguala changed under the current Mayor Abarca's tenure.
> 
> "Crime has been terrible since Jose Luis Abarca took over," says Claudia Guitierrez, a 20-year-old law student. "Iguala was never like this before."
> 
> These days Mexico's new paramilitary gendarmerie patrols Iguala's streets. Twenty-two local cops are under arrest, four are fugitives, and the remainder of the force was relieved of duty.
> 
> Authorities say that on Sept. 26, *officers shot at three buses of students from a poor, rural teaching college who had come into town soliciting donations. After the shooting, with six people dead, the local cops were seen corralling the surviving students into patrol cars. Reportedly some of the officers confessed to turning the students over to a local drug gang, which later killed them.*
> 
> Authorities say they don't have a motive yet, but focus has centered on Iguala's mayor and his wife, who have well-known connections to traffickers.
Click to expand...


What is Mexico's federal government doing?  Why can't they fight off the drug cartels and corruption.  It seems like everyone in a position of power in Mexico is corrupt.  Funny that in Mexico, drugs and guns are banned for ordinary citizen.  Perhaps the citizens of Mexico should take up arms and start fighting against these cartels, and their own government in some instances.


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## Coyote

ChrisL said:


> Coyote said:
> 
> 
> 
> Pretty unbelievable - this isn't some far off over seas country - this is right next door.  And we complain about corruption?
> 
> 43 students murdered and interred in mass graves.
> 
> Elected officials working in collussion with drug gangs and cartels to facilitate this mass murder.
> 
> Unbelievable.  The poor families
> 
> 43 Missing Students 1 Missing Mayor Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico Parallels NPR
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On the second story of the municipal palace in Iguala, Mexico, Mayor Jose Luis Abarca occupied the large corner office. His wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, head of the city's family welfare department, occupied the one right next door. From there, residents say, the two ruthlessly ruled over this city of 150,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. A national newspaper dubbed the duo the "imperial couple."
> 
> But on Sept. 30, their reign ended. The mayor, with his wife by his side, asked the city council for a leave of absence. Neither has been seen since.
> 
> That happened four days after 43 university students disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala. *Twenty-eight bodies — thought to be some of the missing students — were discovered in a nearby mass grave a week ago. More mass graves were discovered Friday.*
> 
> The case highlights the corruption and collusion between politicians and drug traffickers in many parts of rural Mexico today.
> 
> Residents say Iguala changed under the current Mayor Abarca's tenure.
> 
> "Crime has been terrible since Jose Luis Abarca took over," says Claudia Guitierrez, a 20-year-old law student. "Iguala was never like this before."
> 
> These days Mexico's new paramilitary gendarmerie patrols Iguala's streets. Twenty-two local cops are under arrest, four are fugitives, and the remainder of the force was relieved of duty.
> 
> Authorities say that on Sept. 26, *officers shot at three buses of students from a poor, rural teaching college who had come into town soliciting donations. After the shooting, with six people dead, the local cops were seen corralling the surviving students into patrol cars. Reportedly some of the officers confessed to turning the students over to a local drug gang, which later killed them.*
> 
> Authorities say they don't have a motive yet, but focus has centered on Iguala's mayor and his wife, who have well-known connections to traffickers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> What is Mexico's federal government doing?  Why can't they fight off the drug cartels and corruption.  It seems like everyone in a position of power in Mexico is corrupt.  Funny that in Mexico, drugs and guns are banned for ordinary citizen.  Perhaps the citizens of Mexico should take up arms and start fighting against these cartels, and their own government in some instances.
Click to expand...


I don't know what they are doing or can do but I think corruption is so deep seated and intertwined with the cartels and I'm sure politicians that it must make cleaning it up a nightmare.  When I was listening to the radio they mentioned the arrests of a boatload of police in that area for involvement and corruption.

It is also probably difficult for the Mexican authorities to tackle  because the cartels are powerful, well armed - have been known to conduct brutal killings, including decapitations as "lessons" that "your family" could be next.  Doesn't help that the drug trade is so lucrative and the customers mostly in the US that keeps the money flowing.

I don't know much about the Mexican government or political system except that corruption is huge.


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## pismoe

notice the elite in Mexico and notice that most are probably Spanish background .    Look at the old V. Fox and the current prez and they sure weren't / aren't mestizo / indian stock .    Not that it matters to me , just an observation of mine .


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## pismoe

think that MORDIDA runs the show from top to bottom in mexico !!   Plus the drug use / demand in the USA fuels the cartels in mexico .


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## ChrisL

Coyote said:


> ChrisL said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Coyote said:
> 
> 
> 
> Pretty unbelievable - this isn't some far off over seas country - this is right next door.  And we complain about corruption?
> 
> 43 students murdered and interred in mass graves.
> 
> Elected officials working in collussion with drug gangs and cartels to facilitate this mass murder.
> 
> Unbelievable.  The poor families
> 
> 43 Missing Students 1 Missing Mayor Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico Parallels NPR
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On the second story of the municipal palace in Iguala, Mexico, Mayor Jose Luis Abarca occupied the large corner office. His wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, head of the city's family welfare department, occupied the one right next door. From there, residents say, the two ruthlessly ruled over this city of 150,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. A national newspaper dubbed the duo the "imperial couple."
> 
> But on Sept. 30, their reign ended. The mayor, with his wife by his side, asked the city council for a leave of absence. Neither has been seen since.
> 
> That happened four days after 43 university students disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala. *Twenty-eight bodies — thought to be some of the missing students — were discovered in a nearby mass grave a week ago. More mass graves were discovered Friday.*
> 
> The case highlights the corruption and collusion between politicians and drug traffickers in many parts of rural Mexico today.
> 
> Residents say Iguala changed under the current Mayor Abarca's tenure.
> 
> "Crime has been terrible since Jose Luis Abarca took over," says Claudia Guitierrez, a 20-year-old law student. "Iguala was never like this before."
> 
> These days Mexico's new paramilitary gendarmerie patrols Iguala's streets. Twenty-two local cops are under arrest, four are fugitives, and the remainder of the force was relieved of duty.
> 
> Authorities say that on Sept. 26, *officers shot at three buses of students from a poor, rural teaching college who had come into town soliciting donations. After the shooting, with six people dead, the local cops were seen corralling the surviving students into patrol cars. Reportedly some of the officers confessed to turning the students over to a local drug gang, which later killed them.*
> 
> Authorities say they don't have a motive yet, but focus has centered on Iguala's mayor and his wife, who have well-known connections to traffickers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> What is Mexico's federal government doing?  Why can't they fight off the drug cartels and corruption.  It seems like everyone in a position of power in Mexico is corrupt.  Funny that in Mexico, drugs and guns are banned for ordinary citizen.  Perhaps the citizens of Mexico should take up arms and start fighting against these cartels, and their own government in some instances.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> I don't know what they are doing or can do but I think corruption is so deep seated and intertwined with the cartels and I'm sure politicians that it must make cleaning it up a nightmare.  When I was listening to the radio they mentioned the arrests of a boatload of police in that area for involvement and corruption.
> 
> It is also probably difficult for the Mexican authorities to tackle  because the cartels are powerful, well armed - have been known to conduct brutal killings, including decapitations as "lessons" that "your family" could be next.  Doesn't help that the drug trade is so lucrative and the customers mostly in the US that keeps the money flowing.
> 
> I don't know much about the Mexican government or political system except that corruption is huge.
Click to expand...


Not to mention that some of the Mexican government and police are already tied in with the cartels, whether that be because of bribes or some other sense of loyalty to them.  I just wonder why the government allowed the cartels to become as powerful as they are today.  Perhaps if they had nipped this problem in the bud way back in the beginning, it would not be an issue now.


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## Coyote

Bodies In Mexico Mass Grave Apparently Not Those Of Missing Students NPR
_
The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 43 students last month has deepened. Mexican authorities say remains found in a mass grave outside the town of Iquala are not those of the students._​
So nothing is known about the whereabouts of these missing kids   And who's bodies lie in these mass graves?  Sickening


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## ChrisL

Coyote said:


> Bodies In Mexico Mass Grave Apparently Not Those Of Missing Students NPR
> _
> The mystery surrounding the disappearance of 43 students last month has deepened. Mexican authorities say remains found in a mass grave outside the town of Iquala are not those of the students._​
> So nothing is known about the whereabouts of these missing kids   And who's bodies lie in these mass graves?  Sickening



Good grief!  Sickening is right.  I really have to wonder about the Mexican government.  It seems like they do nothing to get this problem under control.


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## pismoe

its a dangerous place , a lot of retired guys I know from a motorcycle message board ride motorcycles in mexico and the stories they tell are enough to make me stay out of mexico .   Course , I'd never go simply based on my one little impression of mexico whan I crossed the border in maybe 1990 .   ---  Dismembered Body Found in Mexico Is Missing US Traveler Harry Devert VICE News  ---  Harry Devert , he was big news about a year ago on that M.C. message board .


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## waltky

Protests against missing trainee teachers in Mexico...

*Thousands March in Mexico Over Feared Student Massacre*
_ October 17, 2014 — Thousands marched in the Mexican beach resort of Acapulco on Friday to demand answers about the fate of 43 missing trainee teachers, who authorities fear were massacred by police in league with gang members._


> The students went missing in the southwestern state of Guerrero on Sept. 26 after clashing with police and masked men, with dozens of police being arrested in connection with a case that has sent shockwaves across Mexico.  Authorities say many of the missing students were abducted by police.  Protesters marched in central Acapulco, a resort that in the 1960s was a magnet for Hollywood stars but is now one of Mexico's most dangerous places, because of drug gang turf wars.  "The people are fed up with so much killing," protesters chanted.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Demonstrators protest the disappearance of 43 students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college in Acapulco, Guerrero state, Mexico
> 
> While the march passed peacefully, storefronts were boarded up as a precaution and many tourists canceled their plans for a weekend visit. Aside from the marchers, there were few people on the streets. In Acapulco's beach district, however, some tourists continued to relax undisturbed.  Many protesters were calling for the resignation of Angel Aguirre, the governor of Guerrero state, where violence has mushroomed in recent weeks and months.  "Why are they killing us?" 48-year-old laborer Pedro Padilla wanted to know. "We're not here just for the students, but also because of what is happening in many places across Guerrero, where the people are very afraid of the narcos."
> 
> Officials have found mass graves in the hills outside the city of Iguala, near the spot where the students disappeared. However, of an initial group of 28 bodies recovered, none of the remains were found to be those of the missing students.  The violence is overshadowing President Enrique Pena Nieto's efforts to focus public attention on sweeping economic reforms aimed at boosting economic growth in Latin America's No. 2 economy.  Pena Nieto took office two years ago pledging to end a wave of violence that has claimed about 100,000 victims since the start of 2007. Although homicides have diminished on his watch, other crimes such as extortion and kidnapping have increased.
> 
> Thousands March in Mexico Over Feared Student Massacre


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## waltky

Gang kingpin arrested in missing students case after massive protests...

*Suspect in missing students case caught*
_Sun, Oct 19, 2014 - CLOSING NET: Authorities investigating the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico arrested a gang kingpin shortly after thousands of protesters marched in Acapulco_


> Mexican authorities announced on Friday the arrest of the “maximum leader” of a drug gang accused of colluding with crooked police in the disappearance of 43 college students.  Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said the arrest of the Guerreros Unidos gang kingpin Sidronio Casarrubias would open a “new line of investigation that can quickly and more easily get us closer to the truth” in the case.  The announcement came hours after thousands of protesters marched in Acapulco to demand the safe return of the 43 young men, who went missing in the southern state of Guerrero three weeks ago.  Tomas Zeron, director of investigations in the prosecutor’s office, said Casarrubias was arrested on Thursday at a police checkpoint on a highway between Mexico City and the nearby city of Toluca.
> 
> The announcement came three days after authorities said another Guerreros Unidos leader, Benjamin Mondragon, killed himself when federal police surrounded him in the central state of Morelos.  Authorities say the gang worked hand-in-hand with corrupt municipal officers in a night of violence in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26 that left six people dead and the 43 aspiring teachers missing.  Iguala’s officers shot at the students’ buses and then handed them to their counterparts in the neighboring town of Cocula, who delivered the 43 young men to the Guerreros Unidos, according to authorities.  Casarrubias denied ordering the attack on the students, but was informed when it happened and did nothing to stop it, Murillo Karam said.  A total of 36 municipal officers have been arrested in the case, along with 17 Guerreros Unidos members and their boss, he said.
> 
> The attorney general said investigators are still analyzing the contents of three mass graves found near Iguala, after declaring last week that 28 bodies in one pit did not belong to the students.  More than 1,200 security forces are looking for the college students around Iguala.  The mass disappearance has sparked international and national outrage, with protests held across Mexico last week and a new demonstration in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco on Friday.  Chanting “they took them alive, we want them back alive,” thousands of students, teachers and farmers also called for the resignation of Guerrero Governor Angel Aguirre over his handling of the case.  “We are angry because this is not an isolated event. Many of us are parents and we see very ugly things in this country that we want to fight,” 34-year-old teacher Magdalena Catalan said.
> 
> Many of the protesters wore masks in the latest demonstration over the mass disappearance.  “We are enraged against the government. It’s going to be a month [since the disappearance] and we have seen nothing,” a machete-wielding farmer said.  The US embassy issued an “emergency message” urging its citizens to stay away from the demonstration.  However, the protest was peaceful, unlike a demonstration in Guerrero’s capital on Monday that ended with students torching part of the state government’s headquarters.  The protesters have threatened to seize all 81 municipal offices in Guerrero to pressure authorities to find the students.  They took over a fifth town hall on Friday while Acapulco’s government closed its offices as a precaution.  Aircraft, horse-mounted police and divers have been looking for the 43 missing in several towns around Iguala, 200km south of Mexico City.
> 
> Suspect in missing students case caught - Taipei Times


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## ChrisL

waltky said:


> Gang kingpin arrested in missing students case after massive protests...
> 
> *Suspect in missing students case caught*
> _Sun, Oct 19, 2014 - CLOSING NET: Authorities investigating the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico arrested a gang kingpin shortly after thousands of protesters marched in Acapulco_
> 
> 
> 
> Mexican authorities announced on Friday the arrest of the “maximum leader” of a drug gang accused of colluding with crooked police in the disappearance of 43 college students.  Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said the arrest of the Guerreros Unidos gang kingpin Sidronio Casarrubias would open a “new line of investigation that can quickly and more easily get us closer to the truth” in the case.  The announcement came hours after thousands of protesters marched in Acapulco to demand the safe return of the 43 young men, who went missing in the southern state of Guerrero three weeks ago.  Tomas Zeron, director of investigations in the prosecutor’s office, said Casarrubias was arrested on Thursday at a police checkpoint on a highway between Mexico City and the nearby city of Toluca.
> 
> The announcement came three days after authorities said another Guerreros Unidos leader, Benjamin Mondragon, killed himself when federal police surrounded him in the central state of Morelos.  Authorities say the gang worked hand-in-hand with corrupt municipal officers in a night of violence in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26 that left six people dead and the 43 aspiring teachers missing.  Iguala’s officers shot at the students’ buses and then handed them to their counterparts in the neighboring town of Cocula, who delivered the 43 young men to the Guerreros Unidos, according to authorities.  Casarrubias denied ordering the attack on the students, but was informed when it happened and did nothing to stop it, Murillo Karam said.  A total of 36 municipal officers have been arrested in the case, along with 17 Guerreros Unidos members and their boss, he said.
> 
> The attorney general said investigators are still analyzing the contents of three mass graves found near Iguala, after declaring last week that 28 bodies in one pit did not belong to the students.  More than 1,200 security forces are looking for the college students around Iguala.  The mass disappearance has sparked international and national outrage, with protests held across Mexico last week and a new demonstration in the Pacific resort city of Acapulco on Friday.  Chanting “they took them alive, we want them back alive,” thousands of students, teachers and farmers also called for the resignation of Guerrero Governor Angel Aguirre over his handling of the case.  “We are angry because this is not an isolated event. Many of us are parents and we see very ugly things in this country that we want to fight,” 34-year-old teacher Magdalena Catalan said.
> 
> Many of the protesters wore masks in the latest demonstration over the mass disappearance.  “We are enraged against the government. It’s going to be a month [since the disappearance] and we have seen nothing,” a machete-wielding farmer said.  The US embassy issued an “emergency message” urging its citizens to stay away from the demonstration.  However, the protest was peaceful, unlike a demonstration in Guerrero’s capital on Monday that ended with students torching part of the state government’s headquarters.  The protesters have threatened to seize all 81 municipal offices in Guerrero to pressure authorities to find the students.  They took over a fifth town hall on Friday while Acapulco’s government closed its offices as a precaution.  Aircraft, horse-mounted police and divers have been looking for the 43 missing in several towns around Iguala, 200km south of Mexico City.
> 
> Suspect in missing students case caught - Taipei Times
Click to expand...


Interesting.  Kind of hard to really believe anything that comes out of Mexico nowadays though, considering that the government is also corrupt.  Is this for real, or is this guy(and the others arrested) just a scapegoat to placate the people?  Hopefully, these are the right people that were arrested.  What a shame.  My aunt went to Acapulco for her honeymoon years ago and said it was so beautiful and how nice the people were, etc.


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## waltky

Federal Police Take Control Of 13 Towns In Mexico...

*Mexico offers reward for info on missing students*
_20 Oct.`14) — The Mexican government announced rewards Monday of 1.5 million pesos ($111,000) for information on 43 students from a rural teachers' college who have been missing since Sept. 26._


> The government ran full-page ads in Mexican newspapers with pictures of the 43 young men. The government also offered 1.5 million pesos for information on those who had abducted or killed the students.  The government says it still does not know what happened to the students of the radical teachers' college, after they were rounded up by local police and allegedly handed over to gunmen from a drug cartel.  About 50 people have been arrested or detained in the case, including police officers and suspected members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel.  Analyses of remains found in mass graves have so far not matched the students.
> 
> As part of the effort to search for the students — which now includes, air, ground water-borne patrols — and bring order to the violent region of southern Mexico, federal police took control of 13 municipalities in southern Mexico where local police are suspected of links to organized crime.  The municipalities are all within a roughly 125-mile (200-kilometer) radius of Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero, the town where the students from a rural teachers' college disappeared more than three weeks ago after a confrontation with police. Twelve of the municipalities are in Guerrero state and one is in Mexico state. Among them are the tourist destinations of Taxco and Ixtapan de la Sal.
> 
> National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said Sunday night that authorities investigating the disappearance of the students found "irregularities" and "presumed links to organized crime" in the 13 municipal police forces.  Federal police have assumed control of public security in the municipalities, the police chiefs have been sent to a special center for "certification" and their guns are being tested, he said.  Federal forces had already disarmed local police in Iguala and Cocula, and arrested a total of 36 police officers. Both the mayor and police chief of Iguala are fugitives and accused of links to the local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos, believed to have worked with police in disappearing the students.
> 
> The disappearance of the students has outraged Mexicans, with thousands of protesters marching recently in Mexico City, Acapulco and elsewhere to demand their safe return.  On Friday, Mexican officials announced the arrest of Sidronio Casarrubias Salgado, the purported leader of Guerreros Unidos. He was detained Thursday on a highway leaving Mexico City, federal prosecutor Tomas Zeron said.  Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam had said he hoped the arrest would bring new leads in the case.  Rubido said Sunday night that the search for the 43 students is being carried out with the help of relatives and the International Red Cross.
> 
> Mexico offers reward for info on missing students - Yahoo News


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## Coyote

*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


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## ChrisL

Coyote said:


> *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
Click to expand...


Something has to happen in Mexico.  They can't keep going on like this, and something has to give.  Hopefully you keep us up to date here.  I'm so curious to know what happened to these students/teachers, as well as the people found in mass graves.


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## Coyote

Ya, I agree...there are a lot of missing people, graves and bodies.  Who is it?  Where are these students?  I can't imagine they are alive


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## waltky

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?*


----------



## ChrisL

waltky said:


> 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?*
Click to expand...


Good grief!  Is there anyone who can take on the cartels and fix the problems?  I've heard about the protests, and THAT is a good thing.  The Mexican people need to do more of this.  They need to stand up and let the government know that they had better do something.


----------



## waltky

Another hidden grave found may hold remains of missing students...

*Mexican authorities determining whether remains are of missing students*
_Mexican authorities said Monday that they had discovered another hidden grave -- this one by a garbage dump south of Iguala in Guerrero state -- and are examining the remains to determine whether they are the bodies of 43 college students missing for a month._


> 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



See also:

*Expanding Mexico City running out of cemeterie*
_Oct 28,`14-- Edgardo Galvan watched as two gravediggers shoveled muddy soil from his father's grave until they reached a set of bones mixed with wood chips, the remnants of the coffin he was buried in seven years earlier._


> 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.
> 
> MORE


----------



## waltky

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


----------



## ChrisL

waltky said:


> 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
Click to expand...


Interesting, but I hope these are actually the people who are responsible and not just scapegoats.  It's hard to believe anything that the "authorities" out of Mexico claim, as we know they are also corrupt.


----------



## waltky

Forensic experts search town dump gully for remains of missing students...

*Mexico investigators comb gully for missing 43*
_Oct 28,`14  -- Forensic experts combed a gully in southern Mexico on Tuesday for the remains of 43 missing students, as frustration mounted among relatives of both the disappeared and the detained over the lack of answers more than a month into the investigation._


> 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.
> 
> MORE


----------



## Tank

Good thing when they come to America, they change their ways


----------



## waltky

Possible remains of missing students found...

*More remains located in hunt for Mexican students*
_Wed, Oct 29, 2014 - UNDER PRESSURE: The remains were found about 17km from where the students last were seen on Sept. 26. Their disappearance has had major political repercussions_


> 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


----------



## Tank

That only could happen in Mexico, because in America Mexicans act White


----------



## waltky

Nieto meets with parents of missing students...

*Parents of Mexico missing meet with president*
_Oct 29,`14  -- Mexico's president has met with parents of 43 teachers college students for the first time since they disappeared more than a month ago after a confrontation with police in a southern city._


> 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


----------



## waltky

Search for missing students switches to new site...

*Search Underway at New Site in Mexico Missing Students Case*
_ October 29, 2014 ~ Forensic experts in Mexico are once again combing a site for clues to the disappearance of 43 students last month._


> 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


----------



## Coyote

I was listening to the news on the radio last night and they were talking about how the families of the missing students met with the President for 6 hours.  Something has to be done about lawlessness and corruption in that area for sure.


----------



## CrusaderFrank

I'd send in the Marines to take over Mexico City, take over the government and give the cartels a choice: pay taxes, act civilized or get droned. Then we enter into safe and sane immigration policy with the USA where anyone wanting to immigrate does so legally, with ID, registration and vaccinations.


----------



## waltky

Fathers of missing students upset with Pena Nieto...

*Fathers of missing slam Mexican leader*
_Fri, Oct 31, 2014 - FAILED GESTURE: While the president promised to redouble efforts to find the 43 students, a five-hour meeting with their relatives did little to appease irate families_


> 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



See also:

*Bodies found near where US siblings were seized*
_Fri, Oct 31, 2014 - Four bodies were found on Wednesday east of the border city of Matamaros, near where three young Americans went missing more than two weeks ago, a Mexican state official said._


> 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


----------



## waltky

Why everyone should care...

*Iguala one month on: Can Mexico end its wave of violence?*
_1 November 2014 ~ With 43 Mexican students still missing, the Iguala massacre has become an issue the whole world should care about, writes Gaby Wood_


> 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.
> 
> MORE



See also:

*Mexico Police Investigate Police Link in Shooting Deaths of US Siblings*
_ October 31, 2014 ~ Mexican authorities confirmed Thursday that three Americans missing in the border city of Matamoros for more than two weeks have been found shot to death._


> 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


----------



## eagle1462010

This is horrible and nothing new.  It has been going on for quite some time.

Fueled by War on Drugs Mexican Death Toll Could Exceed 120 000 As Calderon Ends Six-Year Reign

Older article, but in 6 years 120,000 casualties in the Drug War.  But it even goes much longer than that.

I worked with a guy, who was in the Mexican army in the early 90's..........They were fighting the drug War then as well.  His mother was shot but not killed as a message to him not to fight the cartels........over 2 decades ago..............

He is a citizen now, and last I heard was doing well as he no longer works with us.  

This War against the cartels has been going on for many decades.


----------



## eagle1462010

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.


----------



## ChrisL

eagle1462010 said:


> 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.



Yeah, Mexico is really hurting.  Now they've lost their tourist industry too.  I don't see how they are even surviving as a country.  It's a country that is financed by drugs apparently.


----------



## ChrisL

CrusaderFrank said:


> I'd send in the Marines to take over Mexico City, take over the government and give the cartels a choice: pay taxes, act civilized or get droned. Then we enter into safe and sane immigration policy with the USA where anyone wanting to immigrate does so legally, with ID, registration and vaccinations.



Then we'll have another country full of terrorists that hate us, and they're our neighbors.


----------



## ChrisL

After reading some of these things, I am SO grateful to be an American citizen.  This is just one reason why it's important to never trust politicians or government.  They need to be kept in check constantly.  Governments have a tendency to become tyrannical, which is just one more reason why our rights (and especially our 2nd amendment right) are very important, and we should never ever let government entities infringe upon ANY of our rights.  They are so precious.


----------



## Coyote

*Police Capture Mexican Mayor Accused Of Ordering Student Kidnappings*

Mexican Federal Police captured the former mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, near Mexico City this morning, the spokesman for the Federal Police said in a tweet.


----------



## ChrisL

Coyote said:


> *Police Capture Mexican Mayor Accused Of Ordering Student Kidnappings*
> 
> Mexican Federal Police captured the former mayor of Iguala, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, near Mexico City this morning, the spokesman for the Federal Police said in a tweet.



Well, that's good news, but I still wonder about the truthfulness of the accusations.  It is the government who is doing the accusing, and I would like to see what kind of evidence they have.  All I've seen is that they say there was some altercation and that the mayor and his wife "ordered" the police to round up these student teachers and hand them over to a cartel.  What evidence do they have of this I wonder, besides hearsay?  I have no idea how they go about gathering evidence and preparing for trial, etc., in Mexico.


----------



## waltky

Are they gettin' fed up an' not gonna take it any more?...

*Mexico's missing students: Will case prove a tipping point?*
_November 6, 2014   ~ The disappearance of 43 college students in September has reverberated deeply in Mexico, bringing together disparate protest movements and raising hopes that leaders will finally have to address the ongoing corruption and impunity it exposes._


> The number 43 is cropping up across Mexico City these days: Written large on banners near Revolution Plaza and scribbled small on posters advertising office space for rent. In a public park, one wall bears the graffiti message: “It hurts 43 times.”  The signs all refer to the mass kidnapping in September of 43 students from a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero. It is not the biggest or bloodiest crime in Mexico’s recent history, but it has struck a national nerve. It has exposed alleged connections between local officials, police, and organized crime. And many here hope it can be a turning point for Mexico, which has struggled to address the corruption and impunity that grip the nation, even as President Enrique Peña Nieto tries to highlight its economic promise.
> 
> Since he took office, the international conversation about Mexico has changed markedly. From the start, Mr. Peña Nieto rallied politicians from rival parties to join a “Pact for Mexico,” enabling passage of landmark reforms including energy, education, and telecommunications. Homicides have fallen by 29 percent since 2012 according to government statistics, and after six years of headlines focused on beheadings and mass graves, suddenly the international media were heralding “Mexico’s Moment” for development and economic growth.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But the students’ abduction in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City, after a run-in with local police has drawn back the curtain once again, exposing the continuing grip of corruption and insecurity. Politicians have started talking about the need for a renewed “Pact for Mexico” that focuses on security, and protests have taken place nationally over the past month. The demonstrations are bigger, broader-based, and more enduring than Mexico has seen in recent years, says Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
> 
> There’s almost a sense of hope that this could lead to a real shift, says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who chairs the government department at the University of Texas Brownsville and focuses on organized crime. “Could it actually be that this is Mexico’s moment?”
> 
> *'The hope of Latin America'*


----------



## waltky

Granny says, "Dat's right - dey finally gettin' tired of it an' ain't gonna take it no more...

*'Enough, I'm tired' comment rallies Mexico protest*
_Nov 8,`14 -- An off-the-cuff comment by the attorney general to cut off a news conference about the apparent killing of 43 missing college students has been taken up by protesters as a rallying cry against Mexico's corruption and drug trade-fueled violence._


> During the session that was televised live Friday, Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam announced that two suspects had led authorities to trash bags believed to contain the incinerated remains of the slain students, who haven't been seen since being led away by police in the southwestern town of Iguala on Sept. 26.  After an hour of speaking, Murillo Karam abruptly signaled for an end to questions by turning away from reporters and saying, "Ya me canse" - a phrase meaning "Enough, I'm tired."  Within hours, the phrase became a hashtag linking messages on Twitter and other social networks. It continued to trend globally Saturday and began to emerge in graffiti, in political cartoons and in video messages posted to YouTube.  Many turned the phrase on the attorney general: "Enough, I'm tired of Murillo Karam," says one. Another asks: "If you're tired, why don't you resign?"
> 
> Other people used it to vent their frustrations with messages such as "Enough, I'm tired of living in a narco state" or "Enough, I'm tired of corrupt politicians."  Mexicans have reacted with outrage to the disappearance of the students from a rural teachers college in Guerrero state and a government response that has failed to fully explain what happened. On Saturday, protesters burned several cars and trucks outside the governor's offices in Chilpancingo, the Guerrero capital where demonstrations over the students' disappearance have escalated into violence several times.  Investigators say Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, ordered police to confront the students, who had gone to Iguala to raise money and had commandeered passenger buses for their use. The couple reportedly feared the students would disrupt an event being led by the wife.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A group of 43 marchers, each representing one of the disappeared rural college students, parade through the streets, calling for people to gather at the city's main plaza, in Mexico City, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014. Forty-three organizations arrived from the southern state of Guerrreo to take part in a rally Sunday, on what will be the 43rd day the young men of the Raul Isidro Burgos school went missing. Suspects in the disappearance of the 43 college students have confessed to loading the youths onto dump trucks, murdering them at a landfill, then burning the bodies and dumping the ashen remains into a river, Mexican authorities said Friday.
> 
> Iguala police fired on the students in two incidents, killing six people. Officers then allegedly turned over 43 arrested students to a local drug gang. Murillo Karam said members of the gang confessed to killing the students before burning their bodies and tossing the ashes and bone fragments into a river.  At least 74 people have been arrested, including Abarca and his wife, who were found Tuesday hiding in a dilapidated home in a rough section of Mexico City.  Families of the missing students insisted they will continue to believe their sons are alive until authorities prove the recovered remains are theirs. Murillo Karam said the bone fragments would be sent to a lab in Austria for testing.
> 
> Manuel Martinez, a spokesman for the families, said the "YaMeCanse" rallying cry was proof that their demand for answers is gaining strength.  "The people are angered and I hope that they continue support us," he said Saturday.  Filmmaker Natalia Beristain was among hundreds of people posting YouTube videos tagged (hash)YaMeCanse.  "Senor Murillo Karam, I, too, am tired," she said. "I'm tired of vanished Mexicans, of the killing of women, of the dead, of the decapitated, of the bodies hanging from bridges, of broken families, of mothers without children, of children without fathers."  "I am tired of the political class that has kidnapped my country, and of the class that corrupts, that lies, that kills," she added. "I, too, am tired."
> 
> News from The Associated Press



See also:

3 Guerrero Unidos drug gang-bangers confess to ghastly massacre of student teachers...

*Three men confess to killing 43 Mexican students*
_Nov. 7, 2014 | The three men said the students were handed over to the Guerrero Unidos gang by local police._


> Three alleged gang members on Friday confessed to killing 43 Mexican college students who disappeared in September.  The missing students from Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa were en route to a protest when their bus was attacked by gunmen in Iguala on Sept. 26. Three students and three others were killed in the ambush.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Local police in Mexico.
> 
> The three men, Patricio Reyes Landa, Jhonatan Osorio Gomez and Agustin Garcia Reyes, allegedly told law enforcement the students were handed over to the Guerrero Unidos gang by local police.  Fifteen of the students were already dead of asphyxia when they were brought to the gang, the rest were burned alive in a trash can, Mexican Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said.  Forensic scientists were working to identify the victims from the burnt remains law enforcement found.
> 
> Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were arrested Tuesday for allegedly masterminding the attack.  According to Karam, the couple wanted to get rid of the students because they didn't want the students' protest to disrupt a planned political event hosted by Pineda in the town the same day.  Dozens of other arrests had been made, including more than 20 local police.
> 
> 3 alleged gang members confess to killing Mexican students - UPI.com


----------



## ChrisL

Well, it seems that the authorities believe they know what happened to these students.  However, the public (and especially the parents of these students) still have a fear and mistrust (and rightfully so) of what their government tells them.  I can't blame them.  I don't really know what to believe when it comes to Mexico, given the amount of blatant corruption that is going on.  SOMEBODY paid these drug cartel people to kill these students, I'm pretty sure on that much.    

How sad this is, yet at the same time it takes horrible acts like this in order to make the people ANGRY enough to demand change.  Let's hope these students didn't die for nothing, and that this leads to some much needed changes.  

Mexico Burned bodies likely of 43 missing students

MEXICO CITY — The 43 students missing for more than six weeks are believed dead after charred human remains were fished from a river and its banks, Mexico's attorney general said Friday.

Extracting DNA will be incredibly difficult after the bodies and other evidence was burned for the better part of a day prior to being tossed in the water, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said at a press conference, adding many of the victims' teeth had "turned to powder."

"I know the enormous pain the information we've obtained causes the family members, a pain we all share," Murillo Karam said. "The statements and information that we have gotten unfortunately points to the murder of a large number of people."

The announcement came after confessions by members of the Guerreros Unidos cartel accused of burning the victims' bodies using gasoline, kindling and tires to keep the fire going, Murillo Karam said. Municipal police handed over the students — some dead, some unconscious — to the gang after a Sept. 26 attack in Iguala, in the southern state of Guerrero, he said.

Authorities have arrested 74 suspects, including Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda. The couple are accused of ordering the assault on the students — whom the pair claimed were coming to interrupt a public party thrown by Pineda. At least 10 more suspects remain at large, Murillo Karam said.

During the press conference, Murillo Karam played video showing charred fragments of bone being pull from the River San Juan in Cocula, located near Iguala. Confessions of suspects testifying to loading the students in dump trucks before taking them to a landfill site there were also shown.

According to the tapes, 15 students were already dead when they arrived at the site, and the rest were shot, the suspects said. A large funeral pyre was then built and burned from midnight until 2 p.m. or 3 p.m along the river.

After the ashes had cooled around 5:30 p.m., the suspects who disposed of the bodies were told to break up the burned bones, place them in garbage bags and dump them in the river.


----------



## waltky

Protests to keep up pressure on Mexican gov't until students are found...

*Parents of missing Mexican students cling to hope*
_Nov 14,`14 -- Maria Telumbre knows fire. She spends her days making tortillas over hot coals, and experience tells her a small goat takes at least four hours to cook. So she refuses to believe the government's explanation that gang thugs incinerated her son and 42 other missing college students in a giant pyre in less than a day, leaving almost nothing to identify the dead._


> The discovery of charred teeth and bone fragments offer Telumbre no more proof of her son's death than the many graves unearthed in Guerrero state since the students disappeared Sept. 26. She simply does not accept that the ashes belong to her 19-year-old son and his classmates.  "How is it possible that in 15 hours they burned so many boys, put them in a bag and threw them into the river?" Telumbre says. "This is impossible. As parents, we don't believe it's them."
> 
> For the government of President Enrique Pena Nieto, the account, delivered by the attorney general and based on the confessions of detained gang members, begins to solve the mystery of the missing students. But for Telumbre, her husband, Clemente Rodriguez, and other parents, it is merely the latest lie from an administration that wants to quiet the poor and put this mess behind it. Their demands for the truth are fueling a pent-up national outrage at the government's inability to confront the brutality of drug cartels, corruption and impunity.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Maria Telumbre, center, walks with a poster emblazoned with the image of her missing 19-year-old son, to the Basilica of Guadalupe for a special Mass, in Mexico City. The discovery of charred teeth and bone fragments in plastic garbage bags offered Telumbre no more proof of her son's death than the many graves unearthed in Guerrero state since the students disappeared Sept. 26. Nor did it cause her 'enormous pain' as Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said it would, because she did not accept that the ashes belonged to her son and his classmates.
> 
> The Rodriguez family's chronicle of disbelief is rooted in collusion between Mexican officials and organized crime. The students of the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa were last seen in the custody of police in the city of Iguala, allegedly at the behest of the mayor. Soldiers and federal police didn't respond to the parents' urgent appeals for help. Federal officials waited 10 days before intervening. And when they did, parents say, authorities focused on finding graves rather than live students, so graves were all they found.
> 
> Telumbre and her husband say their beloved son, Christian Rodriguez Telumbre, is still alive, and they blame the government for failing to rescue him and his classmates.  "They are hidden somewhere," insists Clemente Rodriguez. "I hope that they're going to let them go any day now."
> 
> MORE



See also:

*Missing student protests killing Mexico tourism*
_Fri, Nov 14, 2014 - VACATION NIGHTMARE: Tourist hotspot Acapulco is bracing for a crisis as rallies over 43 students presumed murdered devolved into chaos, scaring away visitors_


> Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has tried to keep the issue of violence separate from his focus on the economy, but the two are converging as violent protests over 43 disappeared students squelch tourism in Acapulco just before a major holiday weekend.  As Mexico prepares to commemorate its 1910 revolution on Monday, hotels in the Pacific resort city have seen a wave of cancelations after demonstrators temporarily shut down the airport, blocked highways and attacked government and political offices in the southern state of Guerrero.  Acapulco hotel occupancy rates are currently at 20 percent, well short of the 85 percent expected for the long weekend when Mexicans typically flock to the beaches, Joaquin Badillo, president of the Employers’ Association for Guerrero state, said om Wednesday.
> 
> More cancelations have been registered for Christmas week, the busiest time of the year for the Acapulco tourism sector, and Badillo said one company that operates 10 hotels has cut about 200 temporary jobs in recent weeks.  “Seasonal employment in tourism is really being hurt,” Badillo said. “We’re talking about cleaning workers, security, bartenders, barkers, transportation.”  Acapulco’s beaches were semi-deserted on Wednesday, except for small groups of sunbathers in the city’s famous Gold Zone. The emblematic Papagayo, Condesa and Icacos beaches were all but empty.  The Employers’ Association called for a six-month tax waiver to get local businesses through the crisis.  “With that, employees would not lack for salary and the businesses can maintain themselves in good shape,” Badillo said.
> 
> In decades past, Acapulco was a favored playground of Hollywood movie stars and other international travelers. While the city’s luster has faded, it remains an important draw for domestic tourists.  Organized crime’s influence has risen in recent years in both Acapulco and the rest of Guerrero State, accompanied by soaring rates of homicide, kidnapping and other violent crimes.  As recently as three years ago, 180 cruise ships docked in the city. So far this year, just five have made port calls, according to statistics from local businesspeople.  Security concerns have also affected other business sectors.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Activists of the Comuna organization perform a symbolic blockade of a pyramid at the archaeological site of Monte Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Wednesday as they hold painted silhouettes representing 43 students thought to have been murdered by gangsters, but who are officially still missing. The banner reads: “Until they are found.”
> 
> Juvenal Becerra, head of a pharmacy trade association, cited a 20 percent downturn in pharmacy business statewide. That includes US$3.8 million in lost business over the past month just in the area around Iguala, where the 43 teachers’ college students disappeared on Sept. 26 following a police attack in which six people died.  “In Iguala and the communities that surround it, some pharmacies have cut hours. They open later and close earlier,” Becerra said, adding that organized gangs “never stopped charging extortion or kidnapping or assaults, but since the students disappeared in September, clients leave home less often.”
> 
> Investigators say the students were rounded up by local police, turned over to a drug gang and apparently killed, with their corpses charred to ash and dumped into a river.  Authorities have yet to confirm that any human remains found during the search for the youths belong to the students and officially they are still considered missing.  On Oct. 17, tens of thousands of protesters marched in Acapulco. On Monday, they blocked the city’s airport for hours, carrying clubs, machetes and gasoline bombs.
> 
> MORE


[/I]


----------



## Coyote

I heard on the news that the protests are spreading and people are demanding accountability.


----------



## ChrisL

Coyote said:


> I heard on the news that the protests are spreading and people are demanding accountability.



Good for them!  Somebody needs to do something.  Things are just out of control there!  I wonder how Mexico is surviving fiscally?  Their tourism industry (which was probably one of their biggest revenue makers) has suffered terribly!  Just how much influence do the cartels have over the government (fed, state and local)?  Have they actually infiltrated the federal government there?  Are they actually "running" things in Mexico now?


----------



## waltky

Teachers band together to protest Mexican gov't...

*Protests in Mexico City could turn violent*
_Nov. 15, 2014 | A contingent of hundreds of teachers is protesting against the government in Mexico City Saturday._


> The protesters are demanding that the government present alive 43 students from Guerrero state that have been missing, and are unofficially presumed dead, since September. Other demands include the repeal of President Enrique Peña Nieto's structural reforms -- particularly education reform -- and the impeachment or resignation of Peña and other high level government officials.  The march has forced the closure of two main avenues that lead downtown, reported local newspaper Reforma. The teachers, affiliated to a teachers' union known as Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (CNTE), are also expected to carry out demonstrations at first lady Angelica Rivera's private residence in the rich west Mexico City neighborhood of Lomas de Chapultepec.
> 
> Residents of that neighborhood have been warned by community groups to avoid the protests and lock up their homes and businesses.  "We recommend to people who live near or transit through that area to make preparations. Do not leave cars parked on the street and lock your homes and businesses," read a communique released by the Central Committee of the Jewish community in Mexico.  The disappearance of the 43 students in Guerrero -- and the government's delayed and poorly received response -- have sparked unrest. Protesters have shut down major highways, burned Guerrero state capital Chilpancingo's main government building, shut down the Acapulco airport (also in Guerrero) and set fire to the front door of Mexico City's historical seat of national government, the National Palace.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto arrives in Beijing to attend the 22nd Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders' Meeting and pay a state visit to China, November 10, 2014. The future risks faced by China's economy are not that scary and the government is confident it can head off the dangers, President Xi Jinping told global business leaders to dispel worries about the world's second-largest economy.
> 
> Further outrage was fanned with the president's trip to China for an APEC summit. Viewed by many as ill-timed because of the ongoing crisis, the trip also carried a negative historical connotation. On Oct. 2, 1968, while then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz was out of town, army, paramilitary and police forces opened fire on a student protest in Mexico City, killing at least 40 students and detaining thousands.  Adding to Peña's troubles, a report by the Aristegui Noticias website uncovered that his family's private residence in Lomas de Chapultepec is worth nearly $7 million and is owned by Grupo Higa, a consortium that rented private jets and airplanes to his administration when he was a governor.
> 
> The government argued the house is being paid for by Rivera, who had a successful career as a soap opera actress before marrying Peña.  The same group, allied with China Railway Construction, won a bid to build a high-speed rail line earlier this year. That bid was later discarded by the government after competing companies argued they had not been given a fair shot at the contract.  The barrage of scandals has ignited calls for the president's resignation. Left-wing politicians and activists, including two-time presidential runner-up Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, have qualified the students' disappearance as a "state crime" and turned that demand into their rallying cry. The president's resignation is unlikely, as federal forces were not involved in the 43 students' disappearance and no Mexican president has resigned since Pascual Ortiz Rubio in 1932.
> 
> MORE


----------



## Taz

Maybe a schoolbus went over a cliff?


----------



## waltky

Mayor Abarca goes to trial...

*Mexico begins court proceeding for mayor*
_Nov 16,`14 -- A federal judge has opened a court proceeding against the former mayor of a southern Mexico city in crimes that preceded the case of 43 missing students from a teachers' college._


> The Federal Judiciary Council said in a statement late Saturday that Jose Luis Abarca has been charged with organized crime, the kidnapping of seven people and the killing of another in crimes that occurred before the students disappeared. Abarca was mayor of Iguala, in Guerrero state, when the students went missing.
> 
> Abarca has been behind bars since he and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were arrested Nov. 4 in a crowded Mexico City neighborhood.
> 
> The Attorney General's Office considers Abarca the mastermind behind six killings and the disappearance of another 43 people in Iguala on Sept. 26.
> 
> News from The Associated Press


----------



## Toro

Mr. H. said:


> I heard a good broadcast on this subject today on NPR.
> That's one fucked up country.
> And we're not far behind...



So, what you're saying is that here in the US, we can soon expect to have a governor of a state with ties to criminal drug gangs implicated in the mass murder of students who were intending to protest the governor?


----------



## ChrisL

Taz said:


> Maybe a schoolbus went over a cliff?



Not a very good defense strategy.


----------



## ChrisL

Toro said:


> Mr. H. said:
> 
> 
> 
> I heard a good broadcast on this subject today on NPR.
> That's one fucked up country.
> And we're not far behind...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> So, what you're saying is that here in the US, we can soon expect to have a governor of a state with ties to criminal drug gangs implicated in the mass murder of students who were intending to protest the governor?
Click to expand...


We probably already do have a governor with ties to criminal drug gangs.  Would that be so surprising to you?  Thankfully, we have a pretty good constitution and rights here to protect us from our government.  Off topic, I know, but this is just one reason why I am against the death penalty.  In no way can I support the government having the power to execute citizens.


----------



## waltky

Mexicans in an uproar over 43 massacred student teachers...

*Molotov cocktails, clashes as Mexico City braces for massacre protests*
_Thu Nov 20, 2014 - Masked demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails and shot fireworks at police near Mexico City's airport on Thursday as thousands prepared to protest President Enrique Pena Nieto's handling of the apparent massacre of 43 trainee teachers._


> Police in riot gear faced down around 300 protesters near the airport a few hours before three major marches were due to begin in support of the students apparently murdered after their abduction by corrupt police on the night of Sept. 26.  No one was injured in the clashes, police said.  The three marches in Mexico City were expected to start later on Thursday and converge on the central square, or Zocalo, on the 114th anniversary of the day the Mexican Revolution to overthrow dictator Porfirio Diaz began in 1910.
> 
> Mexico has been convulsed by a string of protests since the 43 students were taken from the southwestern city of Iguala by police working with a local drug gang and then very likely incinerated, according to the attorney general.  Students and relatives of the missing were expected to be among the protesters, whose numbers were estimated in the thousands, said a spokeswoman for Mexico City police.  A separate protest in the historic center of Mexico City saw around 650 students demonstrating peacefully earlier on Thursday, the spokeswoman added.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A masked demonstrator throws a petrol bomb towards riot police during a protest over the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students, near the Benito Juarez International airport in Mexico City
> 
> The government has been plunged into crisis by the violence in Iguala, where six people also died on the night in question.  Exacerbating public discontent has been a scandal over a lucrative rail contract that personally embarrassed Pena Nieto.  Earlier this month, the government abruptly canceled a $3.75 billion high-speed rail contract awarded to a consortium led by China Railway Construction Corp Ltd, partnered with a group of Mexican firms including one known as Grupo High.
> 
> It then emerged that a subsidiary of Grupo High owned a luxury house that Pena Nieto's wife, Angelica Rivera, was in the process of acquiring, raising questions about the tender and prompting her to announce on Tuesday that she would sell the stake.  But the unapologetic tone of Rivera's announcement has prompted more anger in Mexico, especially as neither she nor her husband have explained why one of the winning team from the rail consortium was also the owner of the family's house.
> 
> Molotov cocktails clashes as Mexico City braces for massacre protests Reuters


----------



## waltky

Mexican bus drivers caught in limbo...

*Drivers stuck for weeks at Mexico teachers college*
_Nov 29,`14  -- The men are holed up with their buses on the college's soccer field, sleeping in the compartments that once held passenger luggage and hanging the clothes they've hand-washed from the windshields._


> While attention has focused on the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students from the Raul Isidro Burgos teachers college in Tixtla, few have paid much attention to the three dozen or more bus drivers who say they are being forced by activists from the school to live as captives and act as chauffeurs for the very people who commandeered their vehicles.  The drivers, some of whom have been at the southern Mexico school more than a month, say they cannot abandon the buses because their companies hold them financially responsible for the vehicles, some of which are worth well over a hundred thousand dollars. And with authorities unwilling to inflame tensions over the disappearance and presumed massacre of students from the school, no one is coming to their rescue.  "They say we aren't kidnapped because we can get out and walk around, or swim in the (campus) pool," said one driver who, like the others holed up at the school, refused to give his name for fear of angering the students. "But a prison inmate can also go out to the exercise yard or the gym, and that doesn't mean they're free."
> 
> The students, who have a long history of sometimes violent activism, have justified the mass bus seizure as "an expropriation" and say they need the vehicles to ferry them to and from the many protests that have erupted in Guerrero state since the Sept. 26 disappearance and likely killing of their colleagues. Omar Garcia, a second-year student at the school, acknowledged it has put the drivers in a bad spot, unable to leave or earn a living to feed their families. But he told The Associated Press the students had no other choice, since they don't know how to maintain the buses or drive such large vehicles.  Drivers have begged their employers to send replacements so they can go home and see their families. So far most companies have refused, though Garcia said an agreement was in the works between the students and the bus owners that would allow drivers to rotate out every 10 days. Several bus companies with vehicles at the school declined to comment, except to acknowledge that they hold the drivers responsible for the vehicles as a matter of policy. The companies say hijackings have become such a frequent problem that some lines have cut back on runs through southern Guerrero state.
> 
> The plight of the drivers at the teachers college is just one example of the government's inability to keep the peace in Guerrero state since the students disappeared, allegedly on orders from a local mayor whose corrupt police handed them over to drug traffickers.  Masked students also control toll booths to collect "donations" from motorists passing on the federal highway and hijack passenger buses for their own use. Protesters from a local teachers' union have burned vehicles, public buildings and the offices of political parties, all while federal and state police stood nearby.  The disappearance of the students has ignited public outrage, with near-daily protests against a government blamed both directly and indirectly for their fate. Such tension has complicated any attempt to help the bus drivers.  "The police ... are not taking action at this moment to avoid giving the appearance of acts of repression," said Guerrero state prosecutors' spokesman Jorge Valdez. "It is the concept of not trying to put out a fire by pouring more gasoline on it."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A bus leaves the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa, where the 43 missing students attended, in the town of Tixtla de Guerrero, Mexico. While world attention has turned to the students of the rural teachers college in southern Mexico, almost no one has noticed the 30 or so bus drivers who say they are being forced to live as captives in order to act as chauffeurs for the activists who commandeered their vehicles. The men, some who’ve been at the school more than a month, say they cannot abandon the field because the bus companies hold them financially responsible for the vehicles worth tens of thousands of dollars. And with authorities unwilling to inflame tensions over the disappearance and presumed massacre of 43 students from the school, no one is coming to their rescue.
> 
> The state's new governor, a former leftist rebel himself, is "looking for a mechanism of conciliation, negotiation, persuasion - a political mechanism" to control the groups, Valdez said.  Authorities also wish to avoid a repeat of an incident three years ago, when police shot and killed two young men from the school while trying to clear a student roadblock. A dozen officers were arrested and two of them charged.  The soccer field has become a parking lot for not only the buses, but for seized delivery trucks that once held Coca-Cola and goods from milk, cheese and snack companies. The drivers said the students looted the goods and sold the merchandise to local vendors.  One bus driver said he has been held since Oct. 24 when he was stopped while driving about a dozen passengers to Acapulco. A group of students blocked a road near Chilpancingo and threatened to pelt the bus with rocks unless he opened the door. The students, he said, boarded and ordered the passengers to get off.  On a recent day, a hijacked gas tanker sat on the field near about 30 luxury buses from the lines that carry Mexico City vacationers to and from Acapulco. All of the buses are late model, with leather seats and individual televisions.  "They know perfectly well which ones are the new ones," another driver, who also feared giving his name, said of the students.
> 
> Associated Press reporters discovered the captive drivers while reporting on the missing students, and had to talk quickly before students shooed them away.  One driver warned journalists, "if they see you talking to us, they'll break your camera."  A pair of students approached reporters as they left the lot. "Who gave you permission to be here?" they asked in angry tones.  The men, who are fed simple meals by the students, said their companies do not pay them for their time as captives. While the students have promised to give them money when they are released, the drivers say that if they do receive anything, it won't come close to their normal earnings of nearly 20,000 pesos ($1,500) per month.  "I haven't had a check for a month. I have to ask for a line of credit that I can't pay," said another driver, who was shirtless because he was hand-washing his only set of clothes. "I'm being ruined."
> 
> News from The Associated Press


----------



## waltky

Mexican Federales takin' over crime scene investigation...

*Mexican federal authorities take over investigation of new mass grave*
_Nov. 28, 2014 | The murders are most likely unrelated to the case of 43 students missing since September._


> Mexican federal authorities took over an investigation Friday relating to 11 burned and decapitated bodies found near a rural road in the state of Guerrero.  The bodies, along with a message from the perpetrators, were found by local authorities Thursday. The sign read, "Here goes your trash" followed by expletives, and allegedly signed by a criminal gang.
> 
> Murder investigations are usually handled by state or local authorities, and in this case, Guerrero authorities began the investigation before it was formally taken over by federal officials. The bodies were then taken to Mexico City to be examined by forensic experts.
> 
> All 11 bodies were male. Guerrero investigators said "it's worth pointing out that the bodies are missing their cephalic extremity, which were not placed in the immediate surroundings of the find." The bodies were also partially incinerated.
> 
> These bodies are most likely unrelated to the case of 43 missing students kidnapped and presumably murdered in September. That incident has sparked intense demonstrations and debate throughout the country.  The town of Chilapa, near the site where the 11 bodies were found, witnessed a violent confrontation between gangs in July, leading authorities to enforce a curfew for several days.
> 
> Read more: New mass grave in Mexico 11 decapitated bodies found - UPI.com


----------



## waltky

Mexican president gonna get tough on crime...

*Mexican Leader Announces Nationwide Crime Crackdown*
_November 27, 2014 ~ Mexico's president announced a nationwide anti-crime plan Thursday that would give Congress the power to dissolve local governments infiltrated by drug gangs and give state authorities control over often-corrupt municipal police._


> As if to underscore the crime problem, Mexican authorities Thursday reported the discovery of 11 mutilated bodies in the violence-racked state of Guerrero, with a note left at the scene tying the massacre to a criminal group. The victims were reported to be men in their 20s who were shot, partially burned or beheaded before being dumped on a highway in the area of Chilapa.  That discovery was made as the country marked the disappearance two months ago of 43 students at a teachers college in the Guerrero city of Iguala. They were reportedly killed and incinerated by a drug gang working with local police.  "Mexico cannot go on like this," President Enrique Pena Nieto said in announcing his initiative.
> 
> His plan would relax the complex manner in which offenses are dealt with at federal, state and local levels. At present, some local police refuse to act to prevent federal crimes like drug trafficking. It would also seek to establish a national identity number or document, though it was unclear what form that would take.  The plan would focus first on four of Mexico's most troubled states — Guerrero, Michoacan, Jalisco and Tamaulipas — sending more federal police and other forces to the "hot land" area of the first two states, where the government has already sent significant contingents of federal police and soldiers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Demonstrator covers face with poster reading "Pena Out" during protest in support of 43 missing students outside office of Mexico's Attorney General, Mexico City
> 
> Other main proposals include:
> 
> — Constitutional reform to establish unified state police forces, going from more than 1,800 weak municipal police forces to 32 forces in the country's 31 states and the capital.
> 
> — Establishment of a single national emergency phone number, preferably "911."
> 
> — Expeditious passage of anti-corruption legislation pending in Congress.
> 
> — Emphasis on a reform agenda in the next session of Congress on civil justice and human rights, including reform of torture laws and investigations into disappeared persons.
> 
> Gang-related violence and the government's crackdown on cartels have left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead or missing since 2006.
> 
> Mexican Leader Announces Nationwide Crime Crackdown


----------



## Coyote

waltky said:


> Mexican president gonna get tough on crime...
> 
> *Mexican Leader Announces Nationwide Crime Crackdown*
> _November 27, 2014 ~ Mexico's president announced a nationwide anti-crime plan Thursday that would give Congress the power to dissolve local governments infiltrated by drug gangs and give state authorities control over often-corrupt municipal police._
> 
> 
> 
> As if to underscore the crime problem, Mexican authorities Thursday reported the discovery of 11 mutilated bodies in the violence-racked state of Guerrero, with a note left at the scene tying the massacre to a criminal group. The victims were reported to be men in their 20s who were shot, partially burned or beheaded before being dumped on a highway in the area of Chilapa.  That discovery was made as the country marked the disappearance two months ago of 43 students at a teachers college in the Guerrero city of Iguala. They were reportedly killed and incinerated by a drug gang working with local police.  "Mexico cannot go on like this," President Enrique Pena Nieto said in announcing his initiative.
> 
> His plan would relax the complex manner in which offenses are dealt with at federal, state and local levels. At present, some local police refuse to act to prevent federal crimes like drug trafficking. It would also seek to establish a national identity number or document, though it was unclear what form that would take.  The plan would focus first on four of Mexico's most troubled states — Guerrero, Michoacan, Jalisco and Tamaulipas — sending more federal police and other forces to the "hot land" area of the first two states, where the government has already sent significant contingents of federal police and soldiers.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Demonstrator covers face with poster reading "Pena Out" during protest in support of 43 missing students outside office of Mexico's Attorney General, Mexico City
> 
> Other main proposals include:
> 
> — Constitutional reform to establish unified state police forces, going from more than 1,800 weak municipal police forces to 32 forces in the country's 31 states and the capital.
> 
> — Establishment of a single national emergency phone number, preferably "911."
> 
> — Expeditious passage of anti-corruption legislation pending in Congress.
> 
> — Emphasis on a reform agenda in the next session of Congress on civil justice and human rights, including reform of torture laws and investigations into disappeared persons.
> 
> Gang-related violence and the government's crackdown on cartels have left tens of thousands of Mexicans dead or missing since 2006.
> 
> Mexican Leader Announces Nationwide Crime Crackdown
Click to expand...


Do you think he really will?


----------



## rightwinger

waltky said:


> Are they gettin' fed up an' not gonna take it any more?...
> 
> *Mexico's missing students: Will case prove a tipping point?*
> _November 6, 2014   ~ The disappearance of 43 college students in September has reverberated deeply in Mexico, bringing together disparate protest movements and raising hopes that leaders will finally have to address the ongoing corruption and impunity it exposes._
> 
> 
> 
> The number 43 is cropping up across Mexico City these days: Written large on banners near Revolution Plaza and scribbled small on posters advertising office space for rent. In a public park, one wall bears the graffiti message: “It hurts 43 times.”  The signs all refer to the mass kidnapping in September of 43 students from a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero. It is not the biggest or bloodiest crime in Mexico’s recent history, but it has struck a national nerve. It has exposed alleged connections between local officials, police, and organized crime. And many here hope it can be a turning point for Mexico, which has struggled to address the corruption and impunity that grip the nation, even as President Enrique Peña Nieto tries to highlight its economic promise.
> 
> Since he took office, the international conversation about Mexico has changed markedly. From the start, Mr. Peña Nieto rallied politicians from rival parties to join a “Pact for Mexico,” enabling passage of landmark reforms including energy, education, and telecommunications. Homicides have fallen by 29 percent since 2012 according to government statistics, and after six years of headlines focused on beheadings and mass graves, suddenly the international media were heralding “Mexico’s Moment” for development and economic growth.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But the students’ abduction in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City, after a run-in with local police has drawn back the curtain once again, exposing the continuing grip of corruption and insecurity. Politicians have started talking about the need for a renewed “Pact for Mexico” that focuses on security, and protests have taken place nationally over the past month. The demonstrations are bigger, broader-based, and more enduring than Mexico has seen in recent years, says Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
> 
> There’s almost a sense of hope that this could lead to a real shift, says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who chairs the government department at the University of Texas Brownsville and focuses on organized crime. “Could it actually be that this is Mexico’s moment?”
> 
> *'The hope of Latin America'*
Click to expand...


We didn't get fed up and not gunna take it no more when we had 20 first graders murdered

Why should Mexico be any different. Like us, they will shrug their shoulders and say.......that's the way it is


----------



## ChrisL

rightwinger said:


> waltky said:
> 
> 
> 
> Are they gettin' fed up an' not gonna take it any more?...
> 
> *Mexico's missing students: Will case prove a tipping point?*
> _November 6, 2014   ~ The disappearance of 43 college students in September has reverberated deeply in Mexico, bringing together disparate protest movements and raising hopes that leaders will finally have to address the ongoing corruption and impunity it exposes._
> 
> 
> 
> The number 43 is cropping up across Mexico City these days: Written large on banners near Revolution Plaza and scribbled small on posters advertising office space for rent. In a public park, one wall bears the graffiti message: “It hurts 43 times.”  The signs all refer to the mass kidnapping in September of 43 students from a teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero. It is not the biggest or bloodiest crime in Mexico’s recent history, but it has struck a national nerve. It has exposed alleged connections between local officials, police, and organized crime. And many here hope it can be a turning point for Mexico, which has struggled to address the corruption and impunity that grip the nation, even as President Enrique Peña Nieto tries to highlight its economic promise.
> 
> Since he took office, the international conversation about Mexico has changed markedly. From the start, Mr. Peña Nieto rallied politicians from rival parties to join a “Pact for Mexico,” enabling passage of landmark reforms including energy, education, and telecommunications. Homicides have fallen by 29 percent since 2012 according to government statistics, and after six years of headlines focused on beheadings and mass graves, suddenly the international media were heralding “Mexico’s Moment” for development and economic growth.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> But the students’ abduction in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City, after a run-in with local police has drawn back the curtain once again, exposing the continuing grip of corruption and insecurity. Politicians have started talking about the need for a renewed “Pact for Mexico” that focuses on security, and protests have taken place nationally over the past month. The demonstrations are bigger, broader-based, and more enduring than Mexico has seen in recent years, says Lorenzo Meyer, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
> 
> There’s almost a sense of hope that this could lead to a real shift, says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, who chairs the government department at the University of Texas Brownsville and focuses on organized crime. “Could it actually be that this is Mexico’s moment?”
> 
> *'The hope of Latin America'*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> We didn't get fed up and not gunna take it no more when we had 20 first graders murdered
> 
> Why should Mexico be any different. Like us, they will shrug their shoulders and say.......that's the way it is
Click to expand...


That is retarded.  We are NOTHING like Mexico, fool!  Mass shootings make up less than 0.1% of ALL crime in the US, genius.


----------



## waltky

'Other disappeared' leave gaping holes in Mexican families...

*'Other disappeared' leave gaping holes in Mexico's fabric*
_16 Sept.`15  — On the morning of her high school graduation, Berenice Navarijo Segura was delayed for a hair and makeup appointment by an explosion of gunfire in the center of town. Her mother was up before dawn preparing stewed goat and beans for the celebration, and didn't want her to risk going out. Her sister, who had made enough salsa for 60 guests, tried to hold back the spirited 19-year-old with questions: "Do you have your wallet? What about your phone?"_


> But there was a reason the family called Berenice "Princess." She'd already paid the salon and was determined to look her best for the big day. Accustomed to dodging gun battles in a region overrun by drug cartels, she waited for only 20 minutes after the shooting subsided before rushing out the door with a promise to be quick.  She hopped onto the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle and vanished into the ranks of Mexico's missing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Snapshots with brief descriptions of missing people are tacked to a board in the San Gerardo Catholic Parish in Iguala, Mexico. Little attention had been paid to the many people who have disappeared or been kidnapped in this region until 43 students from a rural teachers college disappeared in Iguala, Sept. 26, 2014. Two months after the students disappeared, hundreds of families began coming forward to tell their stories, emboldened by the international attention focused on the missing students.
> 
> Sixteen other people, including Berenice's boyfriend, disappeared from Cocula on that day, July 1, 2013 — more than a year before 43 students from a teachers college were detained by police in nearby Iguala and never seen again. For all those months, most of the Cocula families kept quiet, hoping their silence might bring children and spouses home alive, fearing that a complaint might condemn them to death.  "What if I report it and my daughter is nearby and they know I reported it, they hurt her or something?" reasoned Berenice's mother, Rosa Segura Giral.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Relatives of Victor Albarran Varela look at a photo of him, at his home in Cocula, Mexico. He is among the 25,000 Mexicans who have disappeared since 2007, according to the government’s count. Victor was 15 years old when he was taken on July 1, 2013.
> 
> Then the disappearance of the students from the Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa became an international outrage. The government rushed to investigate the crime and announced with great fanfare its official conclusion that the youths had been killed and the ashes of their incinerated bodies dumped in Cocula.  Emboldened by the sudden attention to abductions, the families of Cocula began coming forward, and hundreds of other families from the state of Guerrero emerged from silent anguish. They spoke of their misfortune to each other, often for the first time, and signed lists, adding the names of their loved ones to the government's growing registry of 25,000 people reported missing nationwide since 2007. They swabbed the inside of their cheeks for DNA samples. And they grabbed metal rods to poke in the craggy countryside for traces of the family members whom they started calling "the other disappeared."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In this May 12, 2015 photo, relatives of missing people gather under a tree at the San Gerardo Catholic Parish, in Iguala, Mexico. Little attention had been paid to the many people who have disappeared or been kidnapped in this region until 43 students from a rural teachers' college disappeared in this city on Sept. 26, 2014.
> 
> Sometimes they found evidence of bodies, and sometimes the authorities dug up graves from anonymous fields. More than 100 bodies have been pulled from the soil. But like the students of Ayotzinapa, all but one of whom are unaccounted for, so far the remains of only six of the other disappeared from around Iguala have been identified and given back to their families.  The others are still missing. And their families are the other victims.
> 
> MORE


----------



## waltky

After all this time and only 2 out of 43 identified???...

*Mexico Identifies Possible Second Victim of Student Kidnapping*
_ September 16, 2015 - Mexican authorities say they have identified the remains of a second person missing after last year's kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students in the country's southern Guerrero state._


> Mexico's Attorney General Arely Gomez said Wednesday that experts from Austria's Innsbruck Medical University found indications of a possible match between some of the remains and a student named Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, who was 21 when he disappeared September 26, 2014.  Last December experts identified a bone fragment as belonging to 19-year-old Alexander Mora.  The remains were among bone fragments that were found at a landfill where Mexican prosecutors say the bodies of the students may have been dumped and incinerated.
> 
> But earlier this month, international experts reviewing the Mexican government's probe of the abductions rejected the government's official narrative. They accused investigators of mishandling evidence and relying solely on statements from suspects.  A more than 400-page analysis was released September 6 by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -- the autonomous rights arm of the Organization of American States – said there is no evidence supporting the government's central claim.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A masked protester poses with a sign reading "We are missing 43.
> 
> The government's theory says the students were captured by local police and turned over to drug cartel assassins after commandeering buses for transportation to a protest.  Under that theory -- first presented late last year by Mexico's former attorney general -- the bodies of the students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College were dumped at a trash site and incinerated outside a nearby town.
> 
> But the independent report said the dump fire was not strong enough to burn the victims to ashes, and it said investigators from Chile, Colombia, Guatemala and Spain based that finding on expert analysis.  Human rights activists and parents of the students continue to voice outrage that the investigation has been based on the testimony of more than 100 people arrested on suspicion of involvement in the disappearances.  The detainees include the former mayor of the town of Iguala.
> 
> Mexico Identifies Possible Second Victim of Student Kidnapping


----------



## Coyote

Ya, it's abyssmal - just two!


----------



## emilynghiem

Coyote said:


> Pretty unbelievable - this isn't some far off over seas country - this is right next door.  And we complain about corruption?
> 
> 43 students murdered and interred in mass graves.
> 
> Elected officials working in collussion with drug gangs and cartels to facilitate this mass murder.
> 
> Unbelievable.  The poor families
> 
> 43 Missing Students 1 Missing Mayor Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico Parallels NPR
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On the second story of the municipal palace in Iguala, Mexico, Mayor Jose Luis Abarca occupied the large corner office. His wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, head of the city's family welfare department, occupied the one right next door. From there, residents say, the two ruthlessly ruled over this city of 150,000 in the southern state of Guerrero. A national newspaper dubbed the duo the "imperial couple."
> 
> But on Sept. 30, their reign ended. The mayor, with his wife by his side, asked the city council for a leave of absence. Neither has been seen since.
> 
> That happened four days after 43 university students disappeared after a confrontation with police in Iguala. *Twenty-eight bodies — thought to be some of the missing students — were discovered in a nearby mass grave a week ago. More mass graves were discovered Friday.*
> 
> The case highlights the corruption and collusion between politicians and drug traffickers in many parts of rural Mexico today.
> 
> Residents say Iguala changed under the current Mayor Abarca's tenure.
> 
> "Crime has been terrible since Jose Luis Abarca took over," says Claudia Guitierrez, a 20-year-old law student. "Iguala was never like this before."
> 
> These days Mexico's new paramilitary gendarmerie patrols Iguala's streets. Twenty-two local cops are under arrest, four are fugitives, and the remainder of the force was relieved of duty.
> 
> Authorities say that on Sept. 26, *officers shot at three buses of students from a poor, rural teaching college who had come into town soliciting donations. After the shooting, with six people dead, the local cops were seen corralling the surviving students into patrol cars. Reportedly some of the officers confessed to turning the students over to a local drug gang, which later killed them.*
> 
> Authorities say they don't have a motive yet, but focus has centered on Iguala's mayor and his wife, who have well-known connections to traffickers.
Click to expand...


A friend of mine was trying to explain to me what the border was like.
He said even if you paid police to let you transport illegal cargo over the border,
they'd take your money, then seize your loot anyway.

He said it was like the Wild Wild West, where anything goes.
And big families with old money who own land in the Rio Grande Valley area
can do whatever they want and get away with it. Complete lawlessness where money is the only motivation.


----------



## waltky

Body recovered but corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments...

*In search for Mexico's 43, 1 brutal killing goes ignored*
_Sep 25,`15 -- Unlike the families of the 43 students who disappeared a year ago, Julio Cesar Mondragon's loved ones were left with a body to bury. But there is little comfort in that, because Mondragon's corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments._


> His autopsy showed several skull fractures, internal bleeding and other injuries consistent with torture. His face had been flayed, a tactic often used by the drug cartels to incite terror. Photos of his bloody skull were uploaded to the Internet.  International attention has been focused on the 43 students who vanished a year ago Saturday, but six others died at the hands of police in those hours, including Mondragon, a 22-year-old father of a girl who is now 1 year old. According to an independent group of experts, the disappearances and the killings were the result of a long, coordinated attack against students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa who had come to the southern city of Iguala to commandeer buses for a protest.
> 
> But the events of last Sept. 26 were far from isolated. Some 25,000 people have been reported missing in Mexico since 2007, and hundreds from the Iguala area in the last year alone. The disappearance of the students has drawn attention to others who have been lost, as well as brutal drug cartels, official corruption, government indifference and languishing legal cases.  According to Mexico's former attorney general, the 43 disappeared in an attack by police and the Guerreros Unidos drug gang because they were mistaken for rival gang members. The attorney general said last November they were killed and burned to ash in a giant pyre in the nearby Cocula garbage dump.  The independent experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took apart that version earlier this month, saying authorities knew who the students were from the minute they headed for Iguala, and at the very least did nothing to stop the attacks.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Afrodita Mondragon, mother of slain student Julio Cesar Mondragon, covers her face in grief as she speaks inside her home in San Miguel Tecomatlan, a rural town in the hills of Mexico state. Unlike the families of the 43 students who disappeared a year ago, Julio's loved ones were left with a body to bury. But there is little comfort in that, because his corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments. His autopsy showed several skull fractures and other injuries and internal bleeding to his body consistent with torture. His face had been flayed, a tactic often used by the drug cartels to incite terror and send a message.
> 
> They say the funeral pyre simply didn't happen, and suggest the attack occurred because students unknowingly hijacked a bus carrying illegal drugs or money. Iguala is known as a transit hub for heroin going to the United States.  Families say the judicial neglect extends to Mondragon and five others killed that night. His fellow students Daniel Solis and Julio Cesar Ramirez, were shot dead at close range. Driver Victor Manuel Lugo Ortiz and David Jose Garcia Evangelista, 15, died when police fired at a soccer team bus. Blanca Montiel, 40, was killed by stray gunfire while riding in a taxi.  Mondragon had been on one of the buses when it was attacked, then later showed up at a press conference the students called at 12:30 a.m. amid the mayhem. He fled when police opened fire. Witnesses said shortly after they last saw him, they heard screams from someone they assumed had been detained. About 6 a.m., soldiers found his body less than a mile (kilometer) from where he disappeared.
> 
> Though Mondragon's autopsy points to torture, that doesn't appear in the court records. A report by a military unit at the scene said his face had been peeled off with a knife. But the autopsy says it could have been done by an animal after the body was dumped. His family calls that conclusion "a mockery."  Mondragon's case could provide clues to who was behind the attack, according to the commission. But it languishes in three separate court files. Mondragon's body will be exhumed for a new autopsy.  The former mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, is among 28 people charged with his killing. Authorities say he was the one who ordered the attacks. But Sayuri Herrera, lawyer for the Mondragon family, said it would be easy for any defense attorney to get the charges thrown out because the shabby investigative work and foggy charges filed by prosecutors could weaken the case. Charges have already been dropped against one police officer, who remains jailed for the missing 43.  "There's not even clarity in the accusations," said Herrera.
> 
> MORE


----------



## waltky

How can a land of such colorful people also be the home of such violence??...

*Mexican leader vows truth in student case*
_Sat, Sep 26, 2015 - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto on Thursday pledged to pursue the truth in the case of 43 students who disappeared last year, as frustrated families accused authorities of lying about what happened._


> Pena Nieto spoke for almost three hours with parents of those missing in a Mexico City museum ahead of today’s first anniversary of a tragedy bedeviling his administration.  The mothers and fathers, who were almost halfway into a 43-hour fast in honor of their sons, presented eight demands to Pena Nieto in a document charging that the authorities had manufactured a “historic lie.”  Mexican presidential spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said Pena Nieto signed the document and ordered the Mexican Attorney General’s Office, as well as the interior and foreign ministries, to analyze it.  “We are on the same side and we are working on the same goal: To know what happened to your sons and punish each and every one of those who are responsible. We are searching for the truth together,” Pena Nieto told the parents at the closed-door meeting, Sanchez said.  “The president made it very clear that the investigation remains open, it was never closed, it will not be shelved,” Sanchez said.
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> Sanchez said Pena Nieto ordered the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate the thousands of disappearances in the country, though the spokesman did not explain how it differed from a similar unit created in 2013.  “It’s cosmetic,” security expert Alejandro Hope said. “It all depends on whether there is political will and how much resources they invest into this announcement.”  The parents asked that the unit be placed under international supervision, but Sanchez said it was up to the foreign ministry to look into it.  Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer for the parents, said the president had not yet “committed to fulfilling any” of the demands and that the promises made by Pena Nieto were not new.  Rosales said the parents were “treated in a violent manner” by presidential security after the gathering, a charge that Sanchez denied.
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> Students of Ayotzinapa teachers college hold portraits of the 43 missing students during a march from the school to Chilpancingo, Mexico
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> After the meeting, only the second since the students went missing, the parents returned to the capital’s historic Zocalo square, where they had set up camp on Wednesday.  “We won’t rest, we will be a pebble in his shoes. We won’t go home,” said one mother, Maria de Jesus Tlatempa.  The attorney general’s office has come under criticism from the parents and human rights groups, which have accused it of prematurely declaring that the students were all slaughtered.
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> The students, from a rural teachers college in the southern state of Guerrero, disappeared after they were attacked by local police in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26, last year.  Prosecutors say police then delivered the young men to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which killed them and incinerated their bodies after confusing them with rivals.  The official investigation was questioned earlier this month by independent experts who said they doubted the students were burned in a funeral pyre at a garbage dump.
> 
> Mexican leader vows truth in student case - Taipei Times



See also:

*Mexican President Peña Nieto puts special prosecutor on missing students case*
_Sept. 25, 2015 - His decision came as the families prepare to mark the one-year anniversary of the disappearance._


> Mexico will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the 2014 disappearance of 43 students, President Enrique Peña Nieto told the missing students' families.  He spoke to the families in a private session Thursday in Mexico City.  The families have expressed concern that the year-old investigation is flawed. They seek an international panel of experts to examine the incident and want the possible role of the army to be examined.
> 
> They also believe an initial report was meant to mislead them. A public prosecutor's report concluded the students were illegally detained by corrupt police officers in Mexico's Guerreros state, handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel and then killed, their bodies burned in a garbage dump.  A six-month independent review by analysts, sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an agency of the Organization of American States, found errors in the report.
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> Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, here in the White House in January 2015, will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the 2014 disappearance of 43 students.
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> The meeting of Peña Nieto and the skeptical families resulted in nothing new, said Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer representing the families.  "What guarantee do we have that this new investigation won't be more theater? We're not going to give up; we're going to continue searching," Vidulfo said in Mexico City's central plaza, surrounded by family members.
> 
> Peña Nieto, in a social media message after the meeting, assured the families "we are on the same side and we want the same thing, to know what happened to each of their children."  A public 43-hour hunger strike was begun Wednesday by about 50 family members to note the one-year anniversary of the disappearance. A commemorative march through Mexico City was scheduled for Saturday.
> 
> Mexican President Peña Nieto puts special prosecutor on missing students case


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## waltky

Students' disappearance has become a `cause celebre' in Mexico...

*Mexicans march on anniversary of 43 students' disappearance*
_26 Sept.`15  — Thousands of people marked the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students by marching down Mexico City's premier avenue in an atmosphere of defiant hope Saturday._


> Activists said the movement might bring justice for Mexico's disappeared, though only two of the students' remains have been identified by DNA analysis of charred bone fragments.  While the march was smaller than past demonstrations, the case has helped publicize the thousands who have gone missing since Mexico's drug war started in 2006.  Peace and anti-crime activist Maria Guadalupe Vicencio wore a skirt made of a Mexican flag splattered with fake blood. The names of three disappeared activists from her violence-plagued home state of Tamaulipas were written across her shirt.  Vicencio said the students' movement "sets an example for all Mexicans to wake up, and not be silent."
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> People march along Paseo de la Reforma on the one year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 college students from Guerrero state, in Mexico City, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015. One year ago, several students and bystanders were killed and 43 students vanished in the city of Iguala, allegedly taken by police and then handed over to a criminal gang who burned their bodies in a garbage dump, according to a federal investigation. Families of the missing and independent investigators cast doubts on the official version.
> 
> In a meeting with the parents of the 43 missing students earlier this week, President Enrique Pena Nieto promised to create a special prosecutors' office to investigate all of Mexico's disappearances.  More than 25,000 people disappeared in Mexico between 2007 and July 31, 2015, according to the government. Unidentified bodies often turn up in clandestine graves of the kind used by drug gangs to dispose of victims. But most people disappear without a trace.  The 43 students from a radical teachers college disappeared on Sept. 26, 2014, after a clash with police in Iguala, a city in the southern state of Guerrero. Six other people were killed at the hands of the police during the disturbances.  According to Mexico's former attorney general, local police illegally detained the students and then turned them over to the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos, which then allegedly killed them and incinerated their remains.
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> Relatives of the 43 missing college students hold images of their loved ones during a march marking the one year anniversary of their disappearance in Mexico City, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015. A year ago, several students and bystanders were killed and 43 students vanished in the city of Iguala, allegedly taken by police and then handed over to a criminal gang who burned their bodies in a garbage dump, according to a federal investigation.
> 
> A group of independent experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took apart that version earlier this month, saying the funeral pyre simply couldn't have happened at the small area of a garbage dump where prosecutors say it did.  "For me, the parents of the students have taught us a lesson, about keeping hope for change alive," said Carlos Martel, a business executive who attended Saturday's march with his wife.  The parents of the missing students — many of them barely literate farmers — marched silently at the head of the demonstration. They have refused to accept the government's version that their sons are dead and have called for a new investigation under international supervision. They stoically decline to concede that the chance their sons will be found grows ever more remote.
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> A woman holds up a sign with the number 43 and the name of a missing student as thousands prepare to mark the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 rural college students from Guerrero state with a march in Mexico City
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> And they refuse to give up.  "If they are betting on us getting tired, they're wrong," said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, the father of a missing student.While the government has agreed to re-evaluate the funeral pyre theory, the parents' movement is at a crossroads. Students and relatives of the missing young men blocked traffic on the main highway from Mexico City to the Pacific coast resort of Acapulco on Saturday, but authorities are increasingly less willing to tolerate such disruptions.  Many other Mexican social movements based on outrage, like the 2011 crime victims' caravans, have later lost steam.  "You have to protest," said university professor Francisco de la Isla, who attended the demonstration with his two young sons. "But it's not enough just to hold marches. You can hold two or three marches, but with five, people get tired."  "It's clear you need a political movement," de la Isla said.
> 
> Mexicans march on anniversary of 43 students' disappearance


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## waltky

Parents of missing students won't celebrate Mexico's Day of the Dead...

*Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate*
_Sat, Oct 31, 2015 - As millions of Mexicans set up altars to the dead and buy orange cempasuchil flowers to adorn their Day of the Dead offerings of food and drink, the parents of 43 college students who disappeared last year are refusing to accept the Mexican government’s finding that their children are dead._


> There will be no Day of the Dead altar for Mauricio Ortega, who was 18 when he and the other students were taken away by police in the southern city of Iguala on Sept. 26 last year.  According to government prosecutors, the students were turned over to a drug gang who killed them and incinerated their remains. Charred bone fragments have provided a match to only two of the students.  Mauricio’s father, Meliton Ortega, shakes his head when asked if the family will set up an altar to his son.  “No, for us, our sons are alive,” Ortega said. “It’s not the way the government says, that we should just accept our grief.”
> 
> Parents of the missing students have come up with other ways to mark their sons’ disappearances.  At the radical rural teachers’ college attended by the young men, known as Ayotzinapa, plastic chairs with their names and photos are arranged in rows, a stark reminder of those who used to sit there. Their possessions have been left largely untouched, as if awaiting their return.  After more than 13 months since their disappearance, that seems unlikely. And some, like former Mexican president Vicente Fox, have said the parents “cannot live eternally with this problem in their heads ... they have to accept the reality.”
> 
> Clemente Rodriguez, the father of missing student Christian Alfonso Rodriguez, said those who tell the families that their children are dead “are people who do not have a heart” or who work for the government.  A report by an independent panel of experts concluded the students’ remains could not have been incinerated at a garbage dump as prosecutors argue. Parents insist their sons are alive and, with little proof, assert that the young men are being held at military bases.
> 
> Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate - Taipei Times


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## emilynghiem

waltky said:


> Parents of missing students won't celebrate Mexico's Day of the Dead...
> 
> *Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate*
> _Sat, Oct 31, 2015 - As millions of Mexicans set up altars to the dead and buy orange cempasuchil flowers to adorn their Day of the Dead offerings of food and drink, the parents of 43 college students who disappeared last year are refusing to accept the Mexican government’s finding that their children are dead._
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> There will be no Day of the Dead altar for Mauricio Ortega, who was 18 when he and the other students were taken away by police in the southern city of Iguala on Sept. 26 last year.  According to government prosecutors, the students were turned over to a drug gang who killed them and incinerated their remains. Charred bone fragments have provided a match to only two of the students.  Mauricio’s father, Meliton Ortega, shakes his head when asked if the family will set up an altar to his son.  “No, for us, our sons are alive,” Ortega said. “It’s not the way the government says, that we should just accept our grief.”
> 
> Parents of the missing students have come up with other ways to mark their sons’ disappearances.  At the radical rural teachers’ college attended by the young men, known as Ayotzinapa, plastic chairs with their names and photos are arranged in rows, a stark reminder of those who used to sit there. Their possessions have been left largely untouched, as if awaiting their return.  After more than 13 months since their disappearance, that seems unlikely. And some, like former Mexican president Vicente Fox, have said the parents “cannot live eternally with this problem in their heads ... they have to accept the reality.”
> 
> Clemente Rodriguez, the father of missing student Christian Alfonso Rodriguez, said those who tell the families that their children are dead “are people who do not have a heart” or who work for the government.  A report by an independent panel of experts concluded the students’ remains could not have been incinerated at a garbage dump as prosecutors argue. Parents insist their sons are alive and, with little proof, assert that the young men are being held at military bases.
> 
> Parents refuse to accept sons’ fate - Taipei Times
Click to expand...


This is so very sad. I understand they found some remains, but not enough to provide real answers and closure the families need.
I feel very similarly at a loss for the families in Asia still searching for answers with their loved ones lost at sea in the unresolved plane crashes.

Whatever they are feeling it is beyond what I or anyone can understand unless we've gone through it. I think when that degree of unbearable suffering goes "off the scale"
people have no way to gauge how to respond, and so they don't even try,
for lack of ability to even cope with the immense and unfathomable loss.

I don't think we mean to be cruel by not addressing these wrongs.
I think our definition of justice is so limited, if something breaks all the rules, and defies all reason.
we just don't know where to begin, so we end up doing nothing. And go focus on something
that we do have a socially established way of responding to that we can make sense of.


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## waltky

Cartel killer tells his tale of murder...

*30 lives extinguished, but no regrets: A killer's story*
_15 Dec.`15  — The killer says he "disappeared" a man for the first time at age 20. Nine years later, he says, he has eliminated 30 people — maybe three in error._


> He sometimes feels sorry about the work he does but has no regrets, he says, because he is providing a kind of public service, defending his community from outsiders. Things would be much worse if rivals took over.  "A lot of times your neighborhood, your town, your city is being invaded by people who you think are going to hurt your family, your society," he says. "Well, then you have to act, because the government isn't going to come help you."
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> He operates along the Costa Grande of Guerrero, the southwestern state that is home to glitzy Acapulco as well as to rich farmland used to cultivate heroin poppies and marijuana. Large swaths of the state are controlled or contested by violent drug cartels that traffic in opium paste for the U.S. market, and more than 1,000 people have been reported missing in Guerrero since 2007— far fewer than the actual number believed to have disappeared in the state.
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> A man claiming to be responsible for kidnapping, torture and killing on behalf of a drug cartel speaks to the Associated Press in Guerrero state's Costa Grande region, Mexico. The 29-year-old raises cattle for a living and doesn’t consider himself a drug trafficker or a professional killer, although he is paid for disappearing people. While he acknowledges that what he does is illegal, he says he is defending his people against the violence of other cartels.​
> The plight of the missing and their families burst into public awareness last year when 43 rural college students were detained by police and disappeared from the Guerrero city of Iguala, setting off national protests. Then, suddenly, hundreds more families from the area came forward to report their kidnap victims, known now as "the other disappeared." They told stories of children and spouses abducted from home at gunpoint, or who left the house one day and simply vanished.
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> This is a story from the other side, the tale of a man who kidnaps, tortures and kills for a drug cartel. His story is the mirror image of those recounted by survivors and victims' families, and seems to confirm their worst fears: Many, if not most, of the disappeared likely are never coming home.  "Have you disappeared people?" he is asked.  "Yes," he replies.
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## waltky

Iguala tries to get past student disappearances...

*After student disappearances, Mexico city tries to turn page*
_Dec 21,`15 -- The previous elected mayor is in jail, and the new one wants to "turn the page" on the ugliest chapter in the history of this southern Mexican city._


> Fifteen months ago, when 43 rural college students disappeared at the hands of local police and cartel thugs, Iguala became the symbol of Mexico's narco-brutality. Now, federal police are in charge of security, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party controls city hall - and Mayor Esteban Albarran Mendoza wants to move forward.  "Ask the businesspeople, ask the cab drivers, the housewives, those who live daily here in the city, what they are enduring right now ...," Albarran said. "There is anxiety. There is not peace. There is not security. We want to turn the page on all these kinds of things."  But how can this city move on when, according to a local newspaper's count, there were five murders during Albarran's first week in office, and 25 in his first two months?
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> Disappearances continue, and most of the missing have not been found. For hundreds of families around Iguala there is no possibility of turning the page as long as they have no proof of death or a body to mourn.  On Tuesdays, they gather in the San Gerardo church basement to listen to the new numbers from the attorney general's office: bodies found, bodies identified, bodies returned to their families. Most leave without answers and return home to await a call to view photos of clothing or evidence of a genetic match.  While seeking resolution of old horrors, there are new ones.
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> Children play in a recently inaugurated fountain with colored lights, surrounded by posters of the 43 missing students outside City Hall in Iguala, Mexico. Fifteen months ago, when 43 rural college students disappeared at the hands of local police and cartel thugs, Iguala became the symbol of Mexico’s narco-brutality. Now, federal police are in charge of security, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party controls city hall _ and Mayor Esteban Albarran Mendoza wants to move forward.​
> Zenaida Candia Espinobarro already spent her Sundays with other families searching the mountains around Iguala for hidden graves, looking for the remains of a son who disappeared two years ago.  But while she was looking for the bones of one son, she lost another: Armando Velazquez Candia was shot by two men on a motorcycle in front of his girlfriend's house the afternoon of Oct. 26 and died 10 days later.  Along with the bloodshed, the drug trade goes on. Despite the presence of federal and state police, and the military, there is no sign that trafficking has abated around Iguala or elsewhere in Guerrero state - a producer of marijuana and opium paste for the U.S. heroin market.
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> Again this month, state and federal officials promised to secure Guerrero and eradicate more poppy fields, recognizing that efforts of the past year had little impact.  Not that Iguala is unchanged. Former Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca Velazquez was arrested and charged with murder in connection with the disappearance of the 43 students, and 66 police from Iguala and neighboring Cocula have been jailed.  Authorities have disbanded the local police force that allegedly turned the students over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which officials say was closely allied with Abarca.
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## waltky

Mum's the word...

*Experts say obstacles blocking probe of missing students*
_Feb 21,`16  -- International experts for the Inter-American Human Rights Commission said Sunday that they have run into serious obstacles in their investigation into the case of 43 college students who went missing after being detained by police in southern Mexico in 2014._


> Members of the panel said at a news conference that they were concerned about being given limited access to new information uncovered by government investigators and they criticized leaks of statements from some of those arrested in the case that the panel said "don't correspond to the truth."  They also said authorities had not allowed them be present for statements by military personnel who were witnesses of the disappearance or been given access to videos that could clarify what happened that night.
> 
> Later Sunday, the federal Attorney General's Office issued a statement reaffirming its willingness to work with the expert panel and saying it already is investigating the leaks. It denied that officials have fragmented findings from the government's investigation, which it said remains open.  In their first report in September, the expert panel rejected the official version of the government that after being killed, the students' bodies were incinerated at a dump. The panel charged at that time that some Mexican authorities had obstructed justice in the case.
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> The students from a local teachers college have not been seen since Sept. 26, 2014, when they were detained after clashing with municipal police in the city of Iguala in Guerrero state. Six other people were killed during the clashes, including some not involved in the confrontation.  Government prosecutors have said the police turned the students over to a local drug gang, which killed them and burned their bodies.
> 
> News from The Associated Press


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## waltky

17 incinerated remains found in southern Mexican dump...

*Outside experts say at least 17 burned at Mexican dump*
_Apr 1,`16 -- Experts have found evidence of a large fire in which at least 17 bodies were burned at a dump in southern Mexico, a member of the investigating team said Friday, in the latest twist in the case of 43 missing teachers' college students._


> Ricardo Damian Torres, speaking from the offices of Mexico's attorney general, said tests would be conducted in the coming weeks to determine whether it would have been possible to burn all 43 at the dump in the town of Cocula in Guerrero state, where the government has said the students' bodies ended up after disappearing in nearby Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014.  Relatives of the missing students have fiercely disputed the government's version of events and multiple previous investigations by other teams of experts concluded they could not have all been burned at the Cocula dump. The government's perceived mishandling of the symbolic human rights case has dogged the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto.
> 
> In Friday's brief press conference, Torres did not say when such a fire occurred or offer any explanation as to how the team conducted its research and reached its conclusion.  "There is sufficient evidence, including physically observable, to affirm that there was a controlled fire event of great dimensions in the place called the Cocula dump," he said, speaking for the six-member fire-expert team and sitting beside Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos. He took no questions.  In an interview with Milenio TV, Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer representing the families, said they had not reviewed the experts' report and could not discuss it. However, he expressed concern about the way the attorney general's office was handling the investigation.
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> Relatives of the 43 missing students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college march holding pictures of their missing loved ones during a protest in Mexico City. A third investigation of a dump site in southern Mexico found evidence indicating there was a large fire there in which at least 17 people were burned, a member of a six-person fire expert team said Friday​
> It was the latest in a series of investigations into what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa. They disappeared after hijacking buses in Iguala. Evidence indicates they were intercepted by local police and turned over to members of a local drug cartel.  Four months after they disappeared, Mexico's then-attorney general Jesus Murillo Karam laid out the results of the government's investigation with such certainty that he called it the "historic truth." Citing confessions and forensic evidence, he said all 43 students were dead and had been incinerated at a garbage dump outside Cocula.  Murrillo Karam said their incinerated remains were then thrown into a nearby river. Genetic testing of remains the government said it recovered from the river eventually confirmed the identities of two of the missing students. In terms of motive, he said the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which controlled the area, had believed some of the students were from a rival gang.
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## waltky

Bodies burned beyond recognition...

*Experts question report on missing Mexican students*
_Mon, Apr 04, 2016 - Argentine forensic experts who have studied a dump in southern Mexico where Mexican government officials claim the bodies of 43 missing students were burned on Saturday said that results from a new investigation of the site are incomplete and inconclusive._


> The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team released a statement saying that the latest investigation by a team of experts “neither confirms nor denies” the official version of what happened to the students from the Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa.  The team were called in shortly after the teachers’ college students disappeared in Iguala in Guerrero State on Sept. 26, 2014. An investigation by the Mexican government concluded that they were killed by a local drug gang after being confused with members of a rival group.  They were purportedly taken by corrupt local police and handed over to the gang, which incinerated their bodies at a dump in the nearby town of Cocula and threw the remains into a river.
> 
> The team studied the dump and said first in January last year and later in a full report released in February that the evidence did not support the official version of events.  In September last year, another team of independent experts sent by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released a report that dismantled the government’s investigation.  The report said police and the military were monitoring the students, but no one intervened when they were attacked.
> 
> On Friday, a representative of the new team said it had found evidence of a large fire at the Cocula dump.  Team member Ricardo Damian Torres said the remains of at least 17 burned bodies were found in the dump, but he did not specify when the bodies were incinerated.  “There is sufficient evidence, including physically observable, to affirm that there was a controlled fire event of great dimensions in the place called the Cocula dump,” he said, speaking for the six-member fire-expert team.
> 
> Experts question report on missing Mexican students - Taipei Times


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## waltky

Granny says, Dat's right - sometimes ya gotta get the guilty to talk...




*Report: Mexican police tortured suspects in students' case*
_Apr 24,`16 ) -- There is strong evidence that Mexican police tortured some of the key suspects arrested in the disappearance of 43 students, according to a report released Sunday by an outside group of experts._


> The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expert group says that a study of 17 of the approximately 123 suspects arrested in the case showed signs of beatings, including, in some cases, dozens of bruises, cuts and scrapes.  One suspect said he was nearly asphyxiated with a plastic bag, and medical studies showed another had been slapped on the ears so hard his eardrums broke and his ears bled.  The Mexican government recently released documents suggesting investigations had been opened against police and military personnel, but authorities have not answered requests about whether anyone has been arrested or charged.
> 
> The 43 students at the radical teachers' college of Ayotzinapa have not been heard from since they were taken by local police in September 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state. Family members and supporters of the missing students chanted "They took them away alive, we want them back alive!" at the news conference where the report was presented.  No high-ranking officials attended the presentation of the report, which called the government's investigation flawed and incomplete. But President Enrique Pena Nieto wrote in his Twitter account that the federal attorney general's office "will analyze the whole report, to aid in its investigations."  Mexico's deputy attorney general for human rights, Eber Betanzos, said authorities were investigating complaints filed by 31 people who said they had been tortured; he said six criminal cases had been opened, and had that three involved employees of the attorney general's office.
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> Angela Buitrago of the international experts group, left, hugs a relative of the 43 missing students, in Mexico City, Sunday, April 24, 2016. In a report released Sunday, the group said there is evidence that Mexican police tortured some of the key suspects arrested in the disappearance of the students. The 43 students have not been heard from since they were taken by local police in September 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state.​
> Betanzos called the case "the most exhaustive investigation in the history of Mexican law enforcement."  But the allegations of torture could endanger any chance of convictions in one of the highest-profile human rights cases in Mexican history, especially because the government's version of events - that corrupt police handed the students over to drug gang members who killed them and burned their bodies at a trash dump - hangs in large part on the testimony of some drug gunmen who now say they were tortured into confessing.  "It is a lie the way they said they caught us," Patricio Reyes Landa said in testimony made public by the experts' report. "They went into the house, beating and kicking. They hauled me aboard a vehicle, they blindfolded me, tied my feet and hands, they began beating me again and gave me electric shocks, they put a rag over my nose and poured water on it. They gave me shocks on the inside of my mouth and my testicles. They put a bag over my face so I couldn't breathe. It went on for hours."
> 
> Mexican judges are instructed to throw out confessions based on torture; Betanzos said the government's case was not solely based on confessions.  The group of experts complained the government was slow to deliver some of the evidence it had asked for; it criticized government prosecutor's investigations as flawed and incomplete, and suggested that the government wanted to stick to its version, without investigating possible involvement by federal police and the army.  For example, the report said, the roadblocks set up on local highways around the city of Iguala on the night of the disappearances were far more extensive than previously thought. The roadblocks were apparently coordinated by the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel to trap rivals; the gang may have thought the students were part of a rival cartel.
> 
> MORE



See also:

*Mexico missing students: Government 'hampered' independent inquiry*
_Sun, 24 Apr 2016 - A panel of experts investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican trainee teachers in 2014 says the government hampered its inquiries._


> A panel of international experts investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican trainee teachers in 2014 says the government of President Enrique Pena Neto has hampered its inquiries.  In its scathing final report, the experts also dismissed the conclusions of the official inquiry.  They said officials failed to pursue the investigative lines they suggested.
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> Relatives of the 43 missing students attend the delivery of the panel's final report in Mexico City​
> The case provoked outrage in Mexico, leading to street protests against perceived impunity.  "The delays in obtaining evidence that could be used to figure out possible lines of investigation translates into a decision (to allow) impunity," said the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) in its report.  The panel was commissioned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
> 
> The trainee teachers went missing after taking part in a protest in the south-western city of Iguala, in Guerrero state, in September 2014.  Mexican prosecutors said they were detained by corrupt policemen under the orders of the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, and handed over to a local criminal gang (Guerreros Unidos), who killed the 43 men and burned their bodies in a local landfill site.  Relatives have always rejected this version, saying the government was trying to cover up the involvement of senior politicians and army officers in the killings.
> 
> *Analysis from Katy Watson, BBC News, Mexico City*


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## waltky

Mexico usin' torture to get confessions in missing students case...

*In Mexico missing students case, suspects allege torture*
_May 10,`16 -- Within weeks of the September 2014 disappearance of 43 college students, Mexican authorities had rounded up scores of suspects and announced they had solved the case._


> At a hastily called news conference, prosecutors showed video of drug gang members confessing to taking the students from police, then slaughtering them and incinerating the bodies at a junkyard and dumping the evidence in a river.  Two independent, international teams of experts subsequently cast doubt on the official investigation. Now, the government case has suffered another blow: Accusations of torture.
> 
> In previously unseen court documents obtained by The Associated Press, 10 of the suspects described a chillingly similar script: First the questions, then the punches, electric shocks and partial asphyxiations with plastic bags; then, finally, the threats to kill their loved ones unless they confessed to stories that backed up the government's line.  Some said they were given planted evidence or prefabricated stories to support the government's conclusions.
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> 
> 
> Police stand guard around the state Congress building, as people pass by outside the fence, some yelling taunts and hurling rocks, on the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of 43 rural college students in Chilpancingo, Mexico. Within weeks of the September 2014 disappearance of students, Mexican authorities had rounded up scores of suspects and announced they had solved the case. But two independent, international teams of experts subsequently cast doubt on the official investigation, and now the government case has suffered another blow: Accusations of torture by federal police or government troops who arrested the suspects on suspicion of ties to the notoriously violent Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.​
> Medical reports published last month by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission appear to confirm the allegations of torture. Of the 10 case files obtained by the AP, the group reviewed five, and it found credible evidence of torture in all of them.  "They were giving me electric shocks in the testicles and all over my body," one of the suspects, Patricio Reyes Landa, a gang member who was detained a month after the students vanished, told a judge in July, according to the documents obtained by AP. "All this time, it was about two and a half hours, I was blindfolded and they were hitting me."  "A person came up and took off my blindfold and showed me a photo of my family - my two daughters, my wife and my brother," he said. "He said if I didn't do everything they told me to, they were going to rape my daughters. ... I told them I was going to do everything they asked."
> 
> Reyes Landa's testimony is crucial to the government case because he was among the first to confess to killing the students and burning their bodies at a dump in the town of Cocula, before their charred remains were tossed in the nearby San Juan River. Apart from those confessions and a single bone fragment that was linked through DNA testing to one of the students, the prosecution has almost no other evidence.  Under Mexican law a confession obtained by torture is not admissible in court.  "If the confessions are tossed out and there is no other evidence, basically there is no case," said Denise Gonzalez, a specialist in human rights and international law at Mexico's Ibero-American University.
> 
> MORE


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## waltky

Zeron resigns from his position as Chief Director at Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency...




*Mexico deserves criticism over handling of disappearance of 43 students*
_Friday 16th September, 2016 | Washington, DC—The resignation of Tomas Zeron from his position as Chief Director at Mexico’s Criminal Investigation Agency (Agencia de Investigacion Criminal, AIC) within the Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la Republica, PGR) could represent an opening to move forward with the investigation into the enforced disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero._


> While at the AIC, Zeron was implicated in obstructing the investigation and manipulating evidence in the Ayotzinapa case. However, despite these serious accusations, President Pena Nieto has named Zeron as Technical Secretary of Mexico’s National Security Council (Consejo de Seguridad Nacional).
> 
> “Zeron’s appointment to the National Security Council sends a disturbing message that senior officials implicated in serious wrongdoing will not be punished, but rather promoted. While Zeron’s departure from the PGR is important, the Mexican government should not be let off the hook from investigating him and other officials involved in the obstruction of justice in the case,” affirms Maureen Meyer, WOLA Senior Associate for Mexico. “Zeron did not act on his own; he formed part of a broader effort within the Mexican government to invent a ‘historic truth’ about what happened to the students that has been proven again and again to be false.”
> 
> The international Group of Experts—appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to provide technical assistance to the Mexican government in the Ayotzinapa case—revealed grave irregularities in Zeron’s role in the investigation, including the possible manipulation of evidence. In a video presented by the Group of Experts and included below, Zeron is seen at Rio San Juan where plastic bags containing burned remains were discovered and where a bone fragment from one of the students was identified—the only positive identification in the case. Official government records show that the bags were discovered by Marine divers on October 29; however, this video shows Zeron at the river with the plastic bags and a key suspect that had been taken out of custody on October 28—a day before the evidence was officially recorded as being found. “The government’s failure to investigate and sanction Zeron’s actions and those of other officials who allegedly tampered with evidence and tortured suspects makes it clear that the government is protecting its own and that there will be no consequences for those involved in the cover-up,” said Meyer.
> 
> Nearly two years after the Ayotzinapa students were attacked and disappeared, the case remains unresolved and there have been zero convictions. Moving into the second anniversary of the students’ tragic disappearance on September 26 and 27, the Mexican government has the opportunity to demonstrate to the students’ families, the Mexican population, and the international community that Zeron’s departure will mean pursuing the lines of investigation proposed by the Group of Experts, full cooperation with the Inter-American Commission’s follow-up mechanism, renewing searches for the disappeared students, and investigating and sanctioning authorities that obstructed justice, tortured suspects, and tampered with evidence. The failure to do so will show the Mexican government’s unwillingness to uncover the truth and achieve justice.
> 
> Mexico deserves criticism over handling of disappearance of 43 students


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## waltky

Pena Nieto needs to declare martial law in Guerrero...

*Ten kidnapped in Mexican state where 43 students were abducted*
_Sunday 20th November, 2016: A group of armed men have kidnapped 10 people in the violent southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero, where 43 students were abducted and likely massacred two years ago, authorities said on Saturday._


> Suspected members of a gang known as Los Tequileros took the 10, which included two minors, from the municipality of San Jeronimo on Thursday evening, said Roberto Alvarez, a spokesman for a government task force overseeing security in Guerrero.  Alvarez said the gang was created by former cohorts of drug cartels the Knights Templar and La Familia, and had been carrying out kidnappings in the state for ransom for several months.
> 
> Home to beach resort Acapulco, Guerrero has been mired in violence for years, and suffered more than 1,650 murders in the first nine months of this year, according to official data.  The kidnappings are the latest sign of how the government is struggling to beat violent crime in the troubled state after suffering one of its biggest crises over the abduction of the 43 trainee teachers in the city of Iguala in late September 2014.
> 
> The government said the 43 were abducted by corrupt police and handed over to another drug gang, who killed the students, believing some of them were working for a rival outfit.  However, the official account, which stated the bodies of the 43 were incinerated, ground up and tossed into a river, was sharply criticized by an independent investigation.
> 
> To date, only the remains of one of the missing youths has been definitively identified.  The disappearance of the 43 and the government's handling of the investigation sparked international condemnation of law and order in Mexico, creating a major headache for President Enrique Pena Nieto.
> 
> Ten kidnapped in Mexican state where 43 students were abducted


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## waltky

Cowards!...





*Mexico defends decision not to release report on 43 missing students*
_Dec. 16, 2016  -- Mexico's Attorney General's Office defended its decision not to release a report on the investigation into 43 missing students from Iguala._


> In response to a New York Times report that the Mexican government refused to release the findings of an internal review, the Attorney General's Office, or PGR, defended its practices -- saying the Inspector General is an "organ" of the PGR that has "full autonomy" but that must adhere to Mexican laws and procedures, such as the verification of reports.  "According to the Mexican legal framework, in order for a determination or resolution to become valid within an administrative or criminal proceeding, and thus capable of producing legal effects, it requires that it be issued with all the formalities established by the law, including the signature of the person who pronounced it," the PGR said in a statement. "Any document that may exist and that has been disseminated through unofficial means, in which references are made to the assessments made on files related to the disappearance of students ... until it is properly formalized, it is a simple projection."
> 
> The New York Times on Thursday reported that the Mexican government refused to release an internal review that said investigators broke the law in the search of the missing students, citing a copy of the report it obtained from an internal review conducted by the Inspector General.  The PGR said the unfinished report's findings are subject to change "as is likely to occur with all kinds of projections in the field of legal procedures."  "In the case at hand, the documents referred to by the NYT are characterized as being without proper formalization, lacking the legal requirements that apply to them, are legally nonexistent; therefore, are prevented from being considered with quality of a formal resolution," the PGR added.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The Times said the report found crucial suspects were arrested and moved illegally, and that the kidnapping investigators' conduct violated "the right to truth" and damaged the victims' right to justice. In one legal violation, a top investigator took a suspect to identify the supposed crime scene without a defense lawyer present.  The findings of the internal review were completed in August and the families of the missing students expected to receive the report. But César Alejandro Chávez Flores, the inspector general, told the families his superiors needed to approve the report first, the Times reported.  Chávez Flores, who prepared the internal review, resigned abruptly four weeks after meeting the families. The Times said the report suggests the findings of the internal review are in bureaucratic limbo.
> 
> In September 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa traveled to the town of Iguala in Mexico's Guerrero state and clashed with police, who opened fire, investigations revealed. Police then handed the students over to drug gangs. Soldiers were at the scene of the clash and relatives of the missing students believe the soldiers played a role in the disappearances by failing to act.  Further investigation into the incident revealed that the police was infiltrated by drug gangs. The three suspects in the case, Patricio Reyes, Jhonatan Osorio and Agustin Garcia, confessed to killing the students and burning the bodies, alleging they were told the students were rival drug gang members.  Only one burnt body of the 43 missing student has been identified.
> 
> Mexico defends decision not to release report on 43 missing students


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## waltky

Suspect arrested in missing students case...




*Mexico missing students: Key suspect arrested*
_13 Mar.`18 - Federal police in Mexico have arrested a man they say is a key suspect in the disappearance of 43 students from the town of Iguala in 2014._


> Erick Uriel Sandoval is accused of forming part of the gang that is thought to have killed the trainee teachers and burned their bodies.  He was arrested in Cocula, the town near the rubbish dump where remains of one of the missing students were found.  The disappearance of the 43 caused outrage in Mexico and abroad.  Alfredo Higuera from the prosecutor's office in charge of investigating the case said that Mr Sandoval was accused of having "played a key role in the actions against the students".  Local media alleged that he was one of the gang members tasked with shooting dead the students.
> 
> Vanished after protesting
> 
> The 43 were part of a larger group of students from a teacher training college in Ayotzinapa who travelled to the nearby town of Iguala to protest against what they saw as discriminatory hiring practices for teachers.  As they were travelling back from Iguala to Ayotzinapa, they were confronted by municipal police, who opened fire on the buses they were travelling in.  The officers maintained they did so because the buses had been hijacked, while the surviving students said that the drivers had agreed to give them a lift.  The 43 missing students have not been seen since that clash on 26 September 2014.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Relatives of the missing students hold regular protests in Mexico City​
> According to the official government report, they were handed over by corrupt police officers to members of local drugs gang Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors).  The gang then took them to a local rubbish dump, where they killed them and burned their bodies, the official report continues.  However, independent experts have cast doubt on the official report, pointing out that the chain of evidence was broken when the bone fragments were tested.  They also said that the government had hampered their investigation.
> 
> Key suspect
> 
> Mr Sandoval is accused of forming part of the Guerreros Unidos drugs gang and prosecutors say he had "direct contact" with the students following their disappearance.  He is one of five suspects for whom prosecutors have offered a reward of 1.5m pesos ($81,000; £58,000).  One of the members of Guerreros Unidos already in custody has reportedly named Mr Sandoval as one of the people who were at the rubbish dump the night the students were killed and their bodies burned.  More than 100 people have been arrested in connection with the case but, two and a half years since the students' disappearance, doubts remain as to what happened to them.
> 
> Suspect held over Mexico missing students


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## pismoe

i think that 'shorty nietos' political friends were part of the crew of murderers  Walt .


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