The government of President Enrique Pena Nieto has faced US and UN calls to solve the disappearance and investigate why gang-linked police attacked the students on September 26.
Pena Nieto deployed hundreds of federal forces to take over security in Iguala on Monday and disarm the local police. Some 30 investigators from the attorney general’s office are in Iguala now.
– Search for students continues –
In Iguala, meanwhile, hundreds of civilian militiamen scoured the city of 140,000 to find the students.
They used machetes to cut through vegetation near the site of the mass grave.
“We will find the young men, dead or alive,” said a self-defense commander called Moises, whose citizen self defense group emerged last year to combat gangs plaguing towns in the rural mountains of Guerrero.
But authorities issued an order via radio for them to turn around.
“The police only conducts searches near roads. We will cover the whole ground,” said Bruno Placido, leader of the UPOEG community police movement.
The students are from a teacher training college near Chilpancingo known as a bastion of radical protests.
Survivors say they had gone to Iguala to collect funds for their studies and were attacked when they were on their way home after seizing buses, a common practice among radical teachers-in-training in Guerrero to move around the state.
While authorities are still investigating the motive, the spotlight has turned on Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de Los Angeles Pineda Villa, president of the local family services agency.
Governor Angel Aguirre said one theory being explored is that the wife was unhappy the students were in town but he warned that the allegation she sent in the police should be taken with caution.
Pineda Villa’s two brothers were members of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel until their deaths in 2009.
Authorities want to question Abarca over his role in the disappearance, but he and his wife have apparently gone into hiding.
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