Bodies Are Found Close to Where Missing Students Clashed With Police in Mexico

By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

Police officers on Saturday guard the site where a mass grave was discovered on the outskirts of Iguala, south of Mexico City. Credit Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MEXICO CITY — The authorities found clandestine graves containing several bodies Saturday near a southern Mexico town where students at a teachers college clashed with the police a week ago, leaving several people dead and up to 43 students missing. Witnesses said many of them were last seen being carried off by officers.

A tip led the authorities to the spot near a hill outside Iguala, about 100 miles south of Mexico City in Guerrero State, one of the poorest and most violence-prone in the country as organized crime groups have battled for power.

State officials speaking to reporters Saturday night declined to say how many bodies were found or whether they were the missing students, but they said DNA analysis and other tests were being conducted to identify the remains.

Officials were bracing for the prospect of one of the largest massacres in recent years of convulsive violence mostly related to drugs or organized crime.

The students disappeared after a chaotic bout of violence, in which local police officers opened fire on them as, depending on the account, they either collected donations for school or sought to hijack buses, as they have commonly done for transportation.

Six people were killed, including three students and three bystanders, and more than 30 people, nearly two dozen of them local police officers, were detained by the state prosecutor’s office in relation to the shooting, which the federal interior minister, Miguel Osorio Chong, called an “incredible” display of excessive force.

But students and family members said they could not account for 43 students after the clashes, and witnesses said they saw police officers taking away several of them.

A reliable local police investigation was all but impossible: The governor of the state, Ángel Aguirre Rivero, said the Iguala force and several others in his state had been corrupted by organized crime groups. Many of the officers in Iguala belonged to a gang called Guerreros Unidos, he said.

The relatives of the missing fought to be heard in a week when unrelated student demonstrations in Mexico City preoccupied the news media, and coming after the revelation that three soldiers were charged with homicide related to the shooting deaths of 22 people captured in a confrontation in June.

Still, after a group of students, relatives and human rights representatives met with federal Interior Ministry officials Friday, they received a pledge that more federal officers and members of the military would join the search.

About 24 hours later, the graves were found.