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Mexican mayor and wife wanted over disappearance of 43 students Mexican mayor and wife wanted over disappearance of 43 students
(about 11 hours later)
A Mexican mayor and his wife were the “probable masterminds” behind the disappearance of 43 student teachers last month, the country’s attorney general has said as he issued arrest warrants for the pair. Amid growing public fury over the failure of Mexican authorities to locate 43 students who disappeared nearly a month ago, the government has identified a local mayor and his wife as the probable masterminds of the crime.
The students went missing on 26 September from Iguala in the south-western state of Guerrero after they clashed with police. The incident sent shockwaves across Mexico and undermined President Enrique Peña Nieto’s claims that Mexico is getting safer under his watch. Attorney general Jesús Murillo said there was clear evidence that José Luis Abarca, the mayor of the southern city of Iguala, ordered local police to target the students because he feared they would disrupt a speech by his wife. He said the police then handed the students over to a local drug trafficking group, known as Guerreros Unidos, who took them to an area where mass graves have since been discovered.
So far, federal authorities have arrested 52 people in connection with the incident, including dozens of police with links to a gang called Guerreros Unidos, or United Warriors. The gang’s leader, Sidronio Casarrubias, was caught last week. “This is the only line of investigation,” Murillo said, adding that it emerged from the interrogation of dozens of police officers and cartel members who have been detained since the students disappeared on 26 September.
Thousands marched in Iguala on Wednesday to protest against the disappearance of the student teachers. After the march, masked men set fire to the municipal offices with molotov cocktails and smashed the windows. The leader of Guerreros Unidos, Sidronio Casarrubias, was arrested last week and told police that the mayor’s wife María de los Angeles Pineda was the group’s “main operator within city hall”, Murillo said. Abarca and Pineda, who was preparing to stand for election next year to replace her husband as mayor, are both now on the run.
In Mexico City, the attorney general, Jesus Murillo, said Casarrubias had told prosecutors that Iguala’s mayor, José Luis Abarca, and his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, had ordered two local police forces to stop the students from disrupting a political event that day. The events in Iguala have underlined the degree to which local politics in the state of Guerrero has become intertwined with the drug trafficking underworld – as it is in drug war hotspots around the country.
“We have issued warrants for the arrest of Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca, his wife Mrs Pineda Villa and police chief Felipe Flores Velázquez, as probable masterminds of the events that occurred in Iguala on 26 September,” Murillo said at a press conference. According to a high level federal official familiar with the case, Guerreros Unidos are one of a handful of small trafficking organisations operating in the state focused on controlling opium paste stockpiles made from poppies grown in the surrounding mountains. The official said they sell the paste to larger trafficking organisations supplying the US market, particularly the Sinaloa cartel.
During the incident, police shot and killed one student and detained the others before turning them over to Guerreros Unidos gang members, Murillo added. He said the gang then mistook the students for members of rival criminal group Los Rojos, or The Reds. Mexican production of opium poppies has grown dramatically in response to the decriminalisation of marijuana in some US states that is giving consumers access to higher quality legal cannabis, the official said.
He also said that according to Casarrubias’ information, Pineda, who the government says comes from a family of high-ranking drug traffickers, was Guerreros Unidos’s top boss within the Iguala government. Iguala, he said, was “consolidated territory” of Guerreros Unidos, though the group was always looking out for attempted incursions by rivals.
Authorities continue to investigate nine mass graves in the area where they have already found 30 bodies. Initial examinations showed none of the bodies belonged to the students. The students, from a famously radical teacher training college called Ayotzinapa 130 kilometers away, apparently stumbled into this explosive mix upon arriving in Iguala after dark on 26 September and commandeering a couple of buses to use in protests later on.
The case has overshadowed Peña Nieto’s bid to restore order in Mexico and shift the focus away from endemic gang violence and on to economic growth in Latin America’s second biggest economy. Drug violence exploded during the rule of his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, and has claimed about 100,000 lives since 2007. In June 2013, students from the college had participated in a violent occupation of city hall in protest at the murder of a local activist that was widely blamed on the mayor.
Security forces killed 19 suspected criminals in the state of Tamaulipas on Tuesday alone, the state government said on Wednesday. Attorney general Murillo said their return caused Pineda to believe they would disrupt a speech she was planning to make. He said the order for police to attack the students came directly from the mayor.
The resulting armed assault by police on the buses carrying the students resulted in the death of six people, as well as the arrests of dozens who, Murillo said, were later transferred to a white truck under the control of a Guerreros Unidos member nicknamed ‘El Gil’ who drove them to a hill on the outskirts of the city.
The gang’s leader, Casarrubios, told investigators that ‘El Gil’ texted him saying that the students were members of a rival criminal group. “With that information, Sidronio Casarrubios okayed the actions in order to defend his area of influence in Iguala,” Murillo said.
The events in Iguala have prompted protests and vigils around the country and abroad, exploding the government’s earlier claims to be bringing the Mexican drug wars under control with the help of improved intelligence and coordination between different levels of government.
Much of the anger has focused on the government’s lacklustre response to multiple signs of what was going on in Iguala, now seen as a symbol of criminal control of elected authorities in conflict areas across the country.
The evidence in Iguala included an increase of the number of people going missing in Iguala in the last couple of years, some of them allegedly at checkpoints set up by the police and Guerreros Unidos at the entrance to the city.