My God: Mass Grave Found in Hills Near Town in South of Mexico; Police Suspected of Delivering Over the Victims to Drug Gangs for Murder

Forty three students have been missing in Mexico since September 26th.

On a hill in Iguala, Mexico, a mass grave of twenty-eight people has been discovered.

They have not yet figured out whose bodies these are -- they are burned, and some are dismembered.

However, witnesses claim that the bodies of seventeen of the missing students are among the dead.

The witnesses -- members of a local gang that the authorities say has infiltrated the police department in this and other towns -- said that 17 students from a local teachers college were apprehended by police officers, turned over to the gang, taken high up on this hill, killed and buried.

They are among 43 students reported missing after a confrontation Sept. 26 with the local police, leaving a series of pressing questions unanswered. Where are the other students? Why would the police want them killed? And if many of these bodies are not those of missing students, whose are they?

The town of Iguala was allegedly run by "the narcos" -- right from the mayor's office.

The mayor, Jose Luis Abarca, who is wanted for questioning in the case, is a fugitive. Two brothers of his wife, María de los Angeles Pineda, were killed in 2009, and were known operatives in the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel, one of the country's largest.

This was something of an open secret. Although residents of this city of 120,000, a farming and manufacturing center 120 miles south of Mexico City, readily whisper that city leaders "were all narcos," as one street vendor put it, it does not appear that the state or federal authorities took much action.

More from CBS:

"Everyone knew about their presumed connections to organized crime," Alejandro Encinas, a senator from the mayor's Democratic Revolution Party, told The Associated Press. "Nobody did anything, not the federal government, not the state government, not the party leadership."

...

The chief prosecutor for Guerrero state, Inaky Blanco, said suspects have testified that as many as 30 members of the local police force were members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang.

The students were ending their fund-raising and meeting up to return home about the same time Pineda was giving an annual state-of-the agency address. State officials say local police went on the attack, shooting at the buses students had hijacked for their return, as well as innocent bystanders in other vehicles. At least six people were killed and more than 25 wounded.

Javier Monroy, an activist in Chilpancingo for the families of the disappeared, said the brutality of the attack "made no sense," but could have been caused by Guerreros Unidos who thought the students were going to disrupt Pineda's speech.

For what it's worth, there are protests throughout the country.

So, the Mexican federal police are now investigating. But these are the same federal police who did nothing about Iguala previously, despite an awful lot of claims that the town was controlled by narcocriminals from top to bottom.

posted by Ace at 06:30 PM

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