Protesters demand Mexico find missing college students

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico – Tens of thousands of teachers, activists and residents marched and blocked a major highway in the Guerrero state capital Wednesday to protest the disappearance of 43 teachers-college students and demand that authorities find them.

The protesters shut down the highway that links Mexico City with Acapulco, marching behind a banner asking “Who governs Guerrero?” – a reference to the fact that local police working with organized crime have been implicated in the disappearances in the city of Iguala.

“Whose hands are we in?” said Rosa Ruth Rodriguez Mendiola, a housewife from the city of Atoyac who joined in the march in Chilpancingo.

Investigators still had no word on whether the 28 bodies found in a mass grave over the weekend included any of the missing students, who disappeared after two attacks allegedly involving Iguala police in which six people were killed and at least 25 wounded.

The students from the radical rural teachers college had gone to Iguala to solicit donations from passers-by. They were meeting up so they could return home about the same time the mayor’s wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, was finishing a speech to local dignitaries downtown.

Javier Monroy, an activist in Chilpancingo for the families of the disappeared, suggested the attack could have been caused by the local gang, Guerreros Unidos, which thought the students were going to disrupt the speech by Pineda, whose relatives have drug gang ties, according to prosecutors.

Federal Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam has declined to speculate on any link between the speech and the violence.

“I am not going to single out any hypothesis until I have confirmed which is the correct one,” he said late Tuesday.

Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca is a fugitive, and state officials have arrested 22 city police officers, who have been replaced temporarily by a special federal police unit.

The whereabouts of the mayor’s wife are unknown. In a Sept. 29 interview with Milenio Television, Abarca said he received reports from police that the students had been attacking and robbing people who had come to the speech and dance.