Missing Students Part of Mexican Scourge

Source: The Wall Street Journal

IGUALA, MexicoEvery day several thousand soldiers, police and civilian volunteers in Mexicos
southern Guerrero state pick through garbage dumps, wade across rivers and scour wooded mountainsides
in search of 43 college students who vanished here nearly six weeks ago. They have yet to find the
students, who officials say were picked up by corrupt police and handed over to an allied drug cartel,
presumably to be killed.
But searchers have found plenty of other horrors, including a string of mass graves with 50 unidentified
victims that DNA tests show are not the students. Most of those victims were chopped into bits and set on
fire.
As the discovery of the other grave sites shows, the mystery of the missing students isnt an isolated case.
The Mexican government estimates more than 22,000 people went missing during the last eight years
of violence here between cartels fighting each other and security forces. Human-rights groups say the toll
could be far higher.
If most of those missing are dead, as rights groups fear, that would significantly raise Mexicos already
staggering death toll of some 100,000 drug-related homicides during the past eight years by more than a
fifth.
The disappearances are a human-rights crisis of major proportions for Mexico, said Jos Miguel
Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.
Human-rights advocates and authorities believe many of the missing have been killed by cartels or
security forces and dumped in mass graves. Some may never be found. One cartel cook in Tijuana
confessed to federal police to having dissolved some 300 bodies in acid before he was caught.
In 2011, police dug up more than 331 bodies near the capital of western Durango state, many of them
dredged from the backyards of suburban homes. Just 120 of the victims were ever identified, partly
because some of the remains were too decomposed, said Raymundo Enriquez, spokesman for the state
prosecutors office.

Six months before that, police found 60 bodies down an abandoned mine shaft near Taxco, the famous
silver town a few dozen miles from where the students went missing. Police believe the victims were
bound and gagged and thrown down alive.
Forced disappearances touch a raw nerve in Latin America, where tens of thousands of people perceived
to be communists or enemies of state went missing at the hands of security forces or their paramilitary

allies during the Cold War in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil, and in Colombias long civil war. The
word desaparecidos has long been a part of the regions political lexicon.

Mexicos missing is a somewhat different phenomenon. Here, the crimes tend to be more about money
than ideology. Drug and kidnapping gangs have perpetrated most of Mexicos disappearances, officials
say. But, if investigators version of events holds true, the case of students shows the line between
organized crime and government security forces can be thin.
Disappearing victims has long been a strategy of the warring gangs, who earn the bulk of their income
trafficking marijuana and methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine to U.S. consumers.
But until recently it played a secondary role to a very public terror campaign in which victims bodies
were hung from bridges, dumped headless on major avenues or dismembered in videos uploaded to the
Internet.

That brutality proved counterproductive, however, often leading to government reprisals amid public
outrage. In recent years, especially since Enrique Pea Nieto took office in December 2012, the killers
have taken greater pains to hide their handiwork, analysts and human-rights advocates say.
That has helped the government argue that Mexicos security situation is improving, something Mr. Pea
Nieto repeatedly has vowed to achieve. The official tally of gangland murders dropped by nearly 28% in
the first half of this year, compared with the period in 2012, the last year of his predecessors term.
Gangland slayings have been declining since their peak in 2011, government and private statistics
indicate.
We have been working very hard so that the clashes, the seemingly daily violence, cease to exist,
Miguel Angel Osorio, Mexicos interior minister, told a radio interviewer last week.
Still, Mr. Osorio acknowledged, the Iguala atrocity has rattled a battle-hardened Mexico because of the
sheer number of those who have gone missing, their status as college students, and the fact prosecutors
say they were nabbed by police and not unknown gunmen, as is usually the case.
Their continued disappearance despite a massive search also has raised alarm, although officials hope
the arrest this week of the ex-Iguala mayor and his wife, who federal officials say ordered police to
confront the students, will provide new leads. With all the power the state has, they cant find our boys,
Felipe de la Cruz, a father of one of the missing students, told reporters following a meeting with Mr.
Pea Nieto last week.
Civic groups say the governments estimate of the number of missing is probably too low. FUNDEC, a
group of relatives of disappeared people based in northern Coahuila state, said that of a total of 149 cases
of missing people reported to federal and Coahuila state authorities, only 26 names appear in the federal
governments list.
The government admits it doesnt know the true number. Each agency said ... they dont have real
numbers and that its difficult for state and municipal authorities to report them, concluded a
document following a meeting between the Interior Ministry, Attorney Generals Office and Red
Cross officials earlier this year. The document is posted on Mexicos transparency institute
website.

One of the most dramatic mass disappearances came on a quiet Friday afternoon in early 2011, when a
small army of enforcers from the vicious Zeta drug cartel swept into Allende, a sleepy town near the
Texas border, to settle a score, state and local government officials, witnesses and human rights activists.
Backed by municipal police officers on the Zetas payroll, these people say, more than 100 gunmen
rampaged in Allende through a long weekend.
Their fury focused on the relatives and employees of three local men who fled to Texas with Zetas
narcotics proceeds and become informants of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. As many as 150
men, women and children disappeared, officials estimate. Some of the victims neighbors say the toll was
at least double that.
The atrocity remained an open secret confined to the Allende area for more than two years. Mexican state
and federal officials neither investigated nor publicized it. Residents and the local media, fearing
gangland reprisals, kept the secret to themselves.
An intense search early this year for remains turned up only bone fragments and places where officials
say bodies might have been incinerated.
Few corners of Mexico have been more battered by the violence than Guerrero, where disappearances
have become common in the rugged mountains inland from the Pacific beach havens of Acapulco and
Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo, especially the communities stretching west and south of Iguala.
Officials in Teloloapan, a dusty market town 35 miles west of Iguala, say their community has had 200
people go missing in the past four years alone.
In Cocula, a hamlet of low-slung, tile-roofed houses a dozen miles south of Iguala, unidentified gunmen
whisked away 14 people in March 2013 and 17 more that July, townspeople say. The victims remain
missing.
They went house to house grabbing people, mostly youths, Coculas mayor, Csar Pealoza, said in an
interview. He added that some in the town say the gangs forced the men to go work in opium fields. We
dont know what happened to them.

Answer the following questions:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

How do police know that the corpses they have found are not the students?
What is said about the missing students in paragraph 4?
What is the name of the famous silver town and what happened there, according to the article?
What other event in latin America is, partially, compared to whats been going on in Mexico?
What do analysts and human-rights advocates say about the killers?
What does the group of relatives of disappeared people in Coahuila say?
What happened in Allende in 2011?
From which state does the majority of the disappeared people addressed in this article comes
from?
9. Out of the reported cases, what is the percentage of people found alive in Mexico during the past
seven and a half years?