Any hope of finding alive the 43 students who disappeared nearly six weeks ago in the southern city of Iguala after being attacked by police, has been close to extinguished by the announcement by federal investigators that they have established that a large group of people were massacred by a local drug trafficking gang in a nearby rubbish dump on the same night. Attorney General Jesús Murillo told a press conference, however, that while there are “many indications” that the victims were the students, the human remains left by the massacre and recovered by investigators from a nearby river are so badly burned that they cannot currently be identified.
The students, he said, remained “disappeared” and the investigation was continuing.
“I know the huge pain that the information we have obtained causes the family members,” Murillo said. “This is something that should never have happened, and must never be repeated.”
The disappearance of the students has exposed both the terrifying levels of violence in some parts of Mexico where organised criminal groups dominate large territories, and the direct involvement of some local authorities in the horror.
It has also underlined the long standing tolerance by the federal authorities of collusion between local politicians, police forces and organised crime. Under pressure to prove that this tolerance has come to an end, Murillo went over the evidence in the case of the disappeared students so far in a lengthy and chilling account of the events that began, he said, when the mayor of Iguala ordered the municipal police to attack the students on the night of 26 September.
“He didn’t say that they should be kidnapped and killed,” Murillo said. “But the order makes it clear that they [the police]should act in that way.” The students, from a radical teacher training college about two hours from Iguala were in the city to commandeer buses to use in a later protest. Advertisement
Police opened fire on them as they were leaving the city in a series of attacks that left six people dead. They also arrested dozens. Murillo said police handed the arrested students over to members of the Guerreros Unidos gang who had allegedly worked closely with Mayor José Luis Abarca since he took office two years ago to the point of setting up check points at the entrance to Iguala to keep out rival gangs.
His wife, Maria de los Angeles Piñeda, was also allegedly close to the group. Both Abarca and Piñeda went underground in the wake of the events, but were arrested this week in Mexico City.
The new evidence, Murillo said, stemmed from the arrest of three gang members over the last week who confessed to participating in the massacre of a large number of people estimated by one of the detainees as over 40, but not explicitly identified as the students.
Exerts of the videotaped confessions shown in the press conference showed the suspects describing how they had loaded their victims onto trucks and taking them to a rubbish tip just outside the neighbouring town of Cocula. One said that about 15 were already dead when they arrived, and the rest were shot after being interrogated. They also described building a huge pyre of the bodies fuelled by diesel, gasoline, tires, wood and plastic. It burned, they said, from about midnight until 2 or 3pm.
The investigation had previously led to the recovery of 38 bodies from other mass graves in the Iguala area that analysis showed did not belong to the students. Murillo said that four of these have now been identified, including a father and son. He also said there were women in the graves, which ruled out a positive identification of the missing students who are all young men.
The detainees told the authorities that they collected the remains in black plastic bags after the ashes had cooled later that afternoon and dumped them in the San Juan river. Murillo said that investigators found evidence of the pyre and retrieved the plastic bags and human remains from the river.
A video shown at the press conference showed charred bone fragments and teeth found in the river and on its banks. “The degradation caused by the fire make it very difficult to extract the DNA that will allow identification,” Murillo said, adding that the teeth turned to dust when handled.
He said the authorities were turning to a specialist lab in Austria in the hope that other remains might still contain enough DNA to allow identification. He stressed that the lab has said it is not possible to predict when this might be clear.
The families, who have always sustained the hope that the students are being held somewhere alive, reacted angrily to the news of the massacre that they received directly from Murillo in a brief and reportedly tense private meeting prior to the press conference.
“They are trying to close the case,” Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the disappeared students told a press conference called to respond to the announcement of massacre. “As long as there are no scientific results, our children are alive.”