Police have detained the former mayor of the southern Mexican city of Iguala, who officials say ordered the attacks on students at a teachers’ college in September that left six dead and 43 missing.
José Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were arrested in Iztapalapa in eastern Mexico City, where they were hiding out in a house, a police official said.
At least 56 other people have been arrested so far in the case, and the Iguala police chief is still a fugitive. The couple’s detention could shed light on the disappearances, which have prompted outraged demonstrations across the country.
“This was the missing piece,” Felipe de la Cruz, the father of one of the missing, told Milenio television. “This arrest will help us find our kids. It was the government who took our kids.”
More than a month after the attacks, Mexican authorities still have not determined the whereabouts of the 43 students, undermining President Enrique Peña Nieto’s claims that Mexico has become safer under his watch.
The students disappeared after an attack by police on the rural teachers’ college in Iguala, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Authorities say it was ordered by Abarca, who thought the students were aiming to interrupt a speech by Pineda, and was carried out by police working with the Guerreros Unidos cartel. Authorities say Pineda was an operative in the cartel.
The search for the students has taken authorities to the hills above Iguala, where 30 bodies have been found in mass graves but not identified so far as any of the students. Last week, the search turned to a gully near a rubbish dump in the neighbouring city of Cocula, but still no remains have been identified.
According to authorities, Abarca went out for dinner on the evening of 26 September, when the students were attacked. He initially told the media that he had ordered police to leave the students alone. But he fled days later after requesting a leave of absence.
Officials have since described how the couple ran Iguala like a fiefdom in cooperation with Guerreros Unidos. Abarca received payments of 2m-3m pesos ($150,000-$220,000) every few weeks as a bribe and to pay off his corrupt police force, according to the attorney general José Murillo Karam.
He called Pineda a major operator in the cartel, an offshoot of the Beltran Leyva gang. Two of her brothers were on the most-wanted drug trafficker list of the former president Felipe Calderón before they were killed in 2009. A third brother, Salamon Pineda, was believed to run the territory in northern Guerrero state for the cartel.
