One of the 43 students missing since they were attacked by police in southern Mexico 10 weeks ago has been confirmed dead following DNA tests on badly charred human remains found in a rubbish tip.
Alexander Mora was 19 at the time he disappeared with the other students in the city of Iguala in the state of Guerrero. The students, from a radical rural teacher training college about two hours away, had gone to the city to commandeer some buses.
Confirmation of Mora’s death coincided with the latest major protest sparked by the disappearance of the students. The march of thousands held in Mexico City on Saturday was headed by parents of the remaining missing who insisted the grim news about Alexander only made them more determined to press on with their demands for justice.
“If the government thinks we are going to retreat and cry it is mistaken,” Felipe de la Cruz, the main spokesman for the parents, told a rally in front of the Monument of the Revolution in the capital’s centre. “They have taken so much from us, even our fear, but they have left us with rage and fury and that is going to keep us going.”
The protests – which have ranged from large and peaceful marches to violent attacks on government buildings and clashes with riot police – have created a major crisis for President Enrique Peña Nieto. On Saturday the relatives were joined by students from universities in the capital, as well as contingents from workers’ and peasants’ organisations, and many individuals who have taken up the cause of the missing students.
As well as demanding the government do more to find the students, the protests have focused attention on deep-rooted political corruption that has allowed drug gangs to establish a reign of terror in parts of Mexico. The president’s efforts to channel the fallout towards local authorities rather than his government has only fuelled the anger. “Enrique Peña Nieto should be in prison,” De La Cruz told the rally. The crowd responded with chants of “Peña Nieto Out”.
The students went missing on the night of 26 September after police opened fire on the convoy of buses in which they were leaving Iguala, in the first of a series of attacks in which six people died including three students.
Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, said the city’s mayor ordered the police to go after the students and the police handed those they had rounded up over to a local drug gang called Guerreros Unidos. On 7 November Murillo announced that the authorities had collected badly burned human bone fragments from a rubbish tip outside of a neighbouring town called Cocula. He said detained members of the gang had led them to the tip where they said they had participated in the massacre and incineration of dozens of young people on a huge funeral pyre that burned for 15 hours on the same night as the students disappeared.
The remains were in such bad condition the government said it did not have the capacity to attempt to identify them and sent them to a specialist lab in Austria. The confirmation that one of the fragments belonged to Mora is the first news to come out of the lab.
Mora and six more of the missing students came from a village called El Pericón in the municipality of Tecoanapa that is also located in Guerrero. Omar Chavez, a doctoral student from Mexico City who was in the march and has family in the town, said a wake for was being held for Mora in Tecoanapa on Saturday night, “but it is a symbolic wake, because there is no body”. Chavez said he expected the identification of the remains to intensify the already acute levels of tension between local communities and the authorities in the area.
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