Fugitive Mexican mayor, wife captured in missing-students case

Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de Los Angeles Pineda, attend an event at the Municipal Palace in Iguala, Mexico on July 3. (Jesus Guerrero / AFP/Getty Images)

By Tracy Wilkinson

Fugitive Mexican mayor and wife, sought by officials in connection with missing 43 students, are found

Jose Luis Abarca, the fugitive mayor of the Guerrero city of Iguala who is accused of ordering an attack on 43 students missing and presumed dead, was captured early Tuesday along with his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, a Mexican official said.

Tracy Wilkinson

Federal police spokesman Jose Ramon Salinas said via Twitter that the two were captured in Mexico City, in the densely populated working-class district of Iztapalapa. Television images showed police vehicles, red lights blazing, arriving at installations of the attorney general’s office in the predawn darkness, presumably with Abarca and Pineda aboard. There, they will be interrogated.
Abarca took a leave of absence from the mayor’s office after the students -- last seen being led away by local police -- went missing on Sept. 26 and just ahead of the discovery by federal authorities of about a dozen hidden mass graves on the outskirts of Iguala. He and his wife, who has close ties to known drug traffickers, quickly vanished and have been sought by federal authorities ever since.

Atty. Gen. Jesus Murillo Karam last month said the they are believed to have ordered local police to intercept and do away with the students, from a rural college for the poor, who were en route to Iguala and might have planned to disrupt a party and speech Pineda was conducting.
The case soon revealed deep penetration by drug gangs of local police and city hall in Iguala, about 120 miles south of Mexico City, and other municipalities in Guerrero state. The governor of the state was forced to resign amid the scandal, which has also handed President Enrique Pena Nieto his worst security crisis in nearly two years of government.

The mayor and his wife had rented a home in Iztapalapa, and the owner may have turned them in, the El Universal newspaper reported. An elite unit of federal police descended on the home early Tuesday and captured the two without resistance, authorities said.
Approximately 36 bodies have been recovered from the hidden graves, but none so far have been identified as the students, whose disappearance has galvanized a broad-based protest movement. A huge march by 43 organizations from Iguala to Mexico City started on Monday. Calling themselves 43 for 43, they planned to arrive in the capital within a week.
“We must honor these young men ... not letting down our guard, not staying quiet, not crossing our arms but fighting every day,” organizer Pepe Alcaraz told reporters.