Anger increases in Mexico as search widens for 43 missing students

Mexican police sent horse-mounted patrols and officers with trained dogs up into the hills around the city of Iguala on Wednesday in an expanded search for 43 college students missing since a clash with police last month.

The stepped-up hunt was ordered after investigators determined that 28 sets of human remains recovered from a mass grave discovered outside Iguala last weekend were not those of any of the youths who haven’t been seen since they were confronted by police in that city on September 26.

Forensics examinations were focusing on a second set of clandestine graves and a third site where another burial pit was found this week. A federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to reveal the information, said another such site was found on Wednesday near Iguala and experts were working to determine its extent.

The digging that continued on Wednesday threatened to reveal even greater horrors in the gang-controlled countryside of the southern state of Guerrero. Each search has turned up more hidden graves, raising the question of how many people have been secretly killed by the area’s drug gangs, apart from those kidnapped.

The wooded hillsides that ring Iguala could become a moral swamp for the government, much like the mass graves discovered in northern Mexico in 2010 that revealed a shocking level of brutality.

“These lamentable acts are a moment that puts to the test the country’s institutions,” President Enrique Pena Nieto said of the Iguala case in a speech.

From the beginning, there were signs that the first mass grave site, found just a few days after the students disappeared, might have contained the bodies of earlier victims of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang. The gang had ties to the wife of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca as well as to local police from Iguala and the nearby town of Cocula. Police from the two towns allegedly turned some of the students over to the drug gang.