Search for Missing Students in Mexico Finds Corpses of at Least 129 Other People

Posters of the missing Ayotzinapa students in front of the Mexican Embassy in Nicaragua in 2014. (Jorge Mejía Peralta / CC BY-SA 2.0)

At least 60 clandestine graves and over 129 bodies have been found in the search for 43 missing college students in the Mexican state of Guerrero over the last 10 months.

None of the remains belong to the 43 trainee teachers from Ayotzinapa, according to the report released by Mexico’s attorney general’s office.

From The Guardian via The Associated Press:

Prosecutors say the students were turned over to a drug gang that killed them and incinerated their bodies in a case that has put attention on the huge number of people who have gone missing in Guerrero and other Mexican states where drug violence is widespread.

The number of bodies and graves found from October to May could possibly be higher than in its report, the attorney general’s office said, because its response to a freedom of information request from the Associated Press covers only those instances in which its mass grave specialists got involved.

Federal authorities began turning up unmarked graves after beginning an investigation into the disappearance of the 43 young men following the confrontation between students and police that resulted in six confirmed deaths in Iguala, a municipality of 120,000 people 200 km (160 miles) south of Mexico City.

Read more here.

For background on the missing students, read our exclusive excerpt from “A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the ‘Mexican Drug War’ ” by Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace (OR Books, 2015).

–Posted by Roisin Davis