Four more mass graves found in Iguala

The Mexican Attorney General’s Office has discovered four more mass graves on the outskirts of Iguala (Guerrero State, southeast Mexico). Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam has announced the arrest of four more suspects in the massacre of a group of student teachers on September 26 at the location where the unmarked graves were found. “We cannot confirm whether these are the remains of the students,” he added.

Murillo Karam said these graves are “relatively close” to the place where authorities found 28 burned bodies in six unmarked burial plots on Monday. Although officials do not know how many corpses are buried at the new locations, the attorney general said the first excavations revealed that these bodies had also been burnt.

After the Guerrero Attorney General’s Office pointed the finger at Iguala Mayor José Luis Abarca because of his omissions regarding the massacre, Murillo Karam confirmed that authorities were looking for the public servant, his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda, and Public Security Secretary Felipe Flores. On Wednesday, Mexican marines arrested Salomón Pineda, the mayor’s brother-in-law, who is suspected of being the leader of the gang Guerreros Unidos and a former member of the Beltrán Leyva cartel.

The skirmishes between students, municipal police and gang members left six people dead. Twenty-five individuals were wounded and 43 student teachers are missing. Officials have arrested 34 people in connection with the massacre - 26 municipal police officers and four people with ties to Guerreros Unidos.

Some of the students’ parents have left Ayotzinapa and gone out into the hills to look for them. A committee from the teacher training college told the news agency EFE that it will only believe reports that say the bodies founded in the unmarked graves belong to their students if Argentinean forensic experts on the investigative team corroborate the government’s DNA results.

President Enrique Peña Nieto has promised that the culprits of the massacre will not go unpunished. “We have to go however deep we need to go and get to those responsible, those who, out of negligence or by their own actions, allowed or covered up the events that happened in Iguala and, if it is eventually confirmed, the unfortunate death of young students.”

Translation: Dyane Jean François