Mexico’s most-wanted couple, accused of running their town as a drug fiefdom and ordering an attack that killed six and left 43 college students missing, were caught on Tuesday in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Mexico City where they were hiding.
Federal police seized Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, in a raid before dawn in Iztapalapa, a working-class neighborhood of the capital. It was a far fall from their reign of wealth and power as the mayor and first lady of Iguala, a town in southern Guerrero state where the students from a teachers’ college went missing September 26, allegedly at the hands of police and a drug cartel.
Even as they were hauled off to the Attorney General’s organized crime unit to give their statements, the capture did nothing to answer the biggest mystery: Where are the students? Their disappearance, and the failure to make progress in the case, has ignited protests across the country and broadsided President Enrique Pena Nieto’s efforts to paint violence in Mexico as a thing of the past.
‘News like this just makes you angrier,’ said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, whose son, Cesar Manuel Gonzalez, is among the missing students. ‘I wish they would put the same intelligence services and effort into finding the students. The ineptitude is staggering.’
Authorities have uncovered mass graves and the remains of 38 people, but none has been identified as the missing students. Besides Tuesday’s arrests, at least 56 other people have been taken into custody, and the Iguala police chief is also being sought. Some hoped the couple’s detention would provide new leads. ‘This was the missing piece. This arrest will help us find our kids,’ Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the missing students, told Milenio television. ‘It was the government who took our kids.’ No shots were fired in Tuesday’s raid on three houses, including the one in which the couple was hiding, according to an official.
Federal police seized Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, in a raid before dawn in Iztapalapa, a working-class neighborhood of the capital. It was a far fall from their reign of wealth and power as the mayor and first lady of Iguala, a town in southern Guerrero state where the students from a teachers’ college went missing September 26, allegedly at the hands of police and a drug cartel.
Even as they were hauled off to the Attorney General’s organized crime unit to give their statements, the capture did nothing to answer the biggest mystery: Where are the students? Their disappearance, and the failure to make progress in the case, has ignited protests across the country and broadsided President Enrique Pena Nieto’s efforts to paint violence in Mexico as a thing of the past.
‘News like this just makes you angrier,’ said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, whose son, Cesar Manuel Gonzalez, is among the missing students. ‘I wish they would put the same intelligence services and effort into finding the students. The ineptitude is staggering.’
Authorities have uncovered mass graves and the remains of 38 people, but none has been identified as the missing students. Besides Tuesday’s arrests, at least 56 other people have been taken into custody, and the Iguala police chief is also being sought. Some hoped the couple’s detention would provide new leads. ‘This was the missing piece. This arrest will help us find our kids,’ Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the missing students, told Milenio television. ‘It was the government who took our kids.’ No shots were fired in Tuesday’s raid on three houses, including the one in which the couple was hiding, according to an official.