Mexican authorities are working to identify 28 bodies found in 6 mass graves outside the
city
of Iguala.
Evidence indicates that these may be some of the bodies of those 43
students who recently went missing after a clash with local police during a protest - an
incident
that involved officers killing at least 6 people.
The situation in Iguala is bad, but a closer look at
this incident and the recent history of mass killings in Mexico tells an even darker story.
There are reports of the police handing the students over to a local drug cartel.
One of the
suspected killers has already admitted to that.
But authorities can’t be absolutely certain
that these are the missing students until DNA testing is complete, because the bodies
could
also belong to literally thousands of other people.
Mass killings by drug cartels - and the law
enforcement agencies tasked with fighting those cartels - happen with alarming regularity
in
Mexico.
This incident is the 4th widely reported mass killing this year alone - and it’s more
than
likely that most incidents aren’t even being reported.
When the last President of Mexico left office, over 26,000 people were reported missing.
The
current President, Enrique Peña Nieto, revised that number down to
8,000, but after public outcry, he revised the number back up to 16,000.
But all three of those
estimates are still far lower than what some human rights groups claim as the real number.
Things have gotten so bad in Mexico that according to some reports, drug-related violence has
claimed more than 70,000 lives since 2006.
So, why did this situation get so out of hand?
Well, in 2006, the Mexican government along with the US Drug Enforcement Agency, started
targeting the heads of drug cartels.
They captured or killed 30 of the 37 most wanted cartel
leaders.
And without their leaders, those cartels broke into hundreds of separate factions
and alliances that began warring against each other with greater frequency and brutality.
We
basically cut the head off the snake, but instead of the snake dying, it just created
thousands of
smaller more violent snakes.
When Mr. Peña Nieto became Mexico’s new President in 2012, he changed the
strategy in their war on drugs.
He shifted the focus away from cartel leaders and put it
on local law enforcement stopping drug violence instead.
He also struck a deal to allow
vigilante groups to keep their weapons as long as they agreed to be integrated into
official security forces.
But corruption among local law enforcement is widespread, so
in a lot of regions the people tasked with stopping the cartels are the very same people
who are working for them.
Hence, the accusations that police handed the student
protesters over to the cartel in the recent incident in Iguala.
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