Pubdate: Fri, 10 Oct 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Ioan Grillo
Note: Ioan Grillo, a senior correspondent for GlobalPost, is the 
author of "El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency."

MEXICO'S CARTEL GOVERNMENT

IGUALA, Mexico - STUDENT protesters in rural Mexico have long dealt 
with heavy-handed police officers. But on the black night of Sept. 
26, students who attended a rural teachers' college realized they 
were facing a far worse menace in this southern city. Not only were 
police officers shooting haphazardly at them, killing three students 
and several passers-by; shady gunmen were also firing from the sidelines.

The next morning, the corpse of a student was dumped on a major 
street. He'd had his skin peeled off and his eyes gouged out. It was 
the mark of drug cartel assassins.

Soldiers and federal detectives detained two alleged cartel hit men, 
who confessed they had conspired with the police to murder students. 
They led troops to pits on the outskirts of Iguala containing 28 
charred corpses. Forensic teams are working to identify the bodies. A 
total of 43 students went missing that night, many last seen being 
bundled into police cars.

When I went to the grave site on an eerie hill, it still stank of 
decaying human flesh. I had just been interviewing some of the 
students' classmates at their university, mostly teenage sons of poor 
farmers, who are idealistic, committed and frightened. I have covered 
cartel violence in Mexico for over a decade. But as I inhaled the 
stench of death on that hill, and saw photos of the mutilated student 
on the road, I felt as never before that I was covering an act of 
pure unadulterated evil.

Why drug cartels want to slaughter students may at first seem 
inexplicable. But it is a symptom of a systematic process that has 
been taking place in Mexico for years. Drug cartels are taking over 
chunks of government apparatus, from local police forces to city and 
state governments. Sometimes, they control the officials; other 
times, cartel members themselves are the officials. I call it state 
capture. A student I talked to had a more visceral term for it: 
narco-politica, or narco-politics.

It's a terrifying concept. Being ruled by corrupt and self-interested 
politicians can be bad. But imagine being ruled by sociopathic 
gangsters. They respond to rowdy students in the only way they 
understand: with extreme violence designed to cause terror. They 
stick the mutilated body of a student on public display in the same 
way they do rival traffickers.

The market city lies amid hills of marijuana and opium fields and is 
the fief of a brutal cell of traffickers who call themselves 
Guerreros Unidos, or Warriors United. After the discovery of the 
massacre of the students, federal soldiers took control of the city. 
Twenty-two police officers were detained for working with the cartel. 
In a brazen move, the Warriors put up banners calling for the release 
of the officers.

The Iguala police chief is now on the run with an arrest warrant 
behind him. The Iguala mayor has also fled town as the state moves to 
impeach him. An intelligence agency report linked him to the 
Warriors, the Mexican media revealed. His wife has also come into the 
spotlight. One of her brothers served prison time for trafficking and 
two others were killed in a gangland shooting, according to the 
intelligence report. Who knows how high this trail of corruption may lead?

The Iguala mayor was a member of the opposition Democratic Revolution 
Party. But the international attention to this atrocity is also an 
embarrassment for President Enrique Pena Nieto. Since taking power in 
2012, he has been laboring to change Mexico's violent image, focusing 
on reforms such as opening up the nation's energy sector to foreign 
companies. He has also taken down major drug traffickers, such as 
Joaquin Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo, and Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, 
also known as El Mas Loco. Some observers say Mr. Pena Nieto's 
reforms have made this "Mexico's moment." But can it really be 
Mexico's moment with such barbaric crimes against young people taking 
place? The president may be reforming Mexico's laws, but this case 
highlights the deep problems in the institutions needed to uphold those laws.

The students in Iguala had themselves protested against Mr. Pena 
Nieto's reforms, as they are opposed to an education law that will 
evaluate teachers. Most come from poor indigenous communities where 
many don't even speak Spanish, and they object to being tested, and 
someday possibly being fired, for not knowing enough English.

The rural teachers' university the students attend is a longtime 
center of radicalism, covered in pictures of Che Guevara and Lenin. 
Their protests can be noisy and anger residents as they blockade 
roads, holding up traffic, and vandalize buildings. To travel to 
their marches, they often commandeer commercial buses. They normally 
return them and the practice is largely tolerated, but the bus 
companies complain about the disruption of their operations.

About 120 of these students had come to Iguala from their nearby 
university on Sept. 26 and took three buses from the city station. 
They were driving the buses out of town when the police officers and 
cartel gunmen opened fire on them. Some students say they threw 
stones back, but none of them were armed when the killing spree began.

The events that led to such a violent response are still blurry. 
There are reports that city officials were particularly angry about 
students disturbing a public event. The large group of boisterous 
students could be seen by cartel operatives as invading their turf. 
But whatever the exact mechanics, the frightening specter is of a 
city controlled by gangsters responding to public disorder with mass murder.

The students wanted the buses to travel to an annual demonstration on 
Oct. 2 in Mexico City. That day commemorates the massacre by soldiers 
of dozens - or possibly hundreds - of students in the capital's 
square of Tlatelolco in the lead-up to the 1968 Olympics. The 
students in Iguala never made it to mourn the dead of half a century 
ago. Now Sept. 26 marks a new date of atrocities on Mexico's calendar.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom