Pubdate: Thu, 23 Oct 2014
Source: Connecticut Post (Bridgeport, CT)
Copyright: 2014 Associated Press
Contact:  http://www.ctpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/574
Author: E. Eduardo Castillo and Mark Stevenson, Associated Press
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

MAYOR LINKED TO DEADLY ATTACK ON STUDENTS

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Officials said Wednesday that a drug gang
implicated in the disappearance of 43 students in a southern city
essentially ran the town, paying the mayor hundreds of thousands of
dollars a month out of its profits from making opium paste to fuel the
U.S. heroin market.

The statements painted the fullest picture yet of the control that is
exercised by gangs over a broad swath of Mexico's hot lands in
Guerrero state. The Guerreros Unidos cartel's deep connections with
local officials in the city of Iguala came to a head Sept. 26 when the
mayor ordered municipal police to detain protesting students, who were
then turned over to the drug gang.

Since then, Mexican authorities have been searching for the students,
spurred on by increasingly violent demonstrations that included the
burning of Iguala's city hall by protesters Wednesday.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said on Wednesday that
investigators had found a total of nine mass graves containing 30 sets
of human remains during the hunt for the missing students. He said
officials were waiting for a second round of DNA tests, after a first
round determined they weren't the bodies of the students.

While the students remain missing, Murillo Karam said the arrests of
Iguala police officers and the leader of the Guerreros Unidos gang,
Sidronio Casarrubias, had provided more evidence about the events
leading up to their disappearance.

Murillo Karam said the students, who attended a radical rural teachers
college, had gained the enmity of Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca
because of a previous demonstration in the city. He said Abarca
ordered police to detain students who hijacked four buses because the
mayor thought they were going to try to disrupt a speech by his wife,
Maria de los Angeles Pineda.

Abarca, his wife and the Iguala police chief are all fugitives. A
total of 52 people, including police officers, Iguala officials and
gang members, have been arrested in the case.

Authorities had previously reported that the mayor's wife, Pineda, had
family ties to Guerreros Unidos. But Murillo Karam said it was much
more than that, reporting that Casarrubias, the arrested drug gang
leader, said she was "the main operator of criminal activities" in
Iguala. Casarrubias also said the mayor had gotten payments of 2
million to 3 million pesos ($150,000-$220,000) every few weeks, as a
bribe and to pay off his corrupt police force.

After Iguala police picked up the students, Murillo Karam said, the
youths were taken to a police station and then to the nearby town of
Cocula. At some point they were loaded aboard a dump truck and taken -
apparently still alive - to an area on the outskirts of Iguala where
the mass graves have been found, he said.

At that point, Casarrubias told authorities, one of his lieutenants
told him the students were members or sympathizers of a rival gang,
the attorney general said.

Guerreros Unidos had sufficient money to bribe the mayor and local
police force because they have increasingly turned to the lucrative
practice of growing opium poppies and sending opium paste to be
refined for heroin destined for the U.S. market, another federal
official said Wednesday.

The official, who is familiar with the case but insisted on speaking
anonymously because he is not authorized to be quoted by name, said
Guerreros Unidos started turning more to opium after income from
marijuana trafficking dropped, apparently because of legalization of
the drug in some U.S. states.

After paying local farmers to grow opium poppies in the rough
mountains around Iguala, the gang warehoused and shipped the opium out
to other regions to be refined, the official said.

"They stockpiled the paste; they sell it to other criminal
organizations," the official said. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard