The search for 43 missing college students in the southern state of Guerrero has turned up at least 60 clandestine graves and 129 bodies over the last 10 months, Mexico’s attorney general’s office says.
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Authorities began investigating unmarked graves as a part of the search for the missing students, after the graves were found between last October and May.
On Sunday, a few hundred people led by parents of the missing youths marched in Mexico City to call for justice in the case.
The actual number of mass graves could be higher. Demonstrations have been held on the 26th of each month since the incident. Their remains were allegedly put in garbage bags and dumped in a nearby river.
The investigation into the students’ disappearance also came under fire from the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) last week, after the board found several failings by Mexican prosecutors.
“If it weren’t for the persistent determination of the families of the Ayotzinapa students, as well as human rights defenders and journalists in demanding from the Mexican authorities a comprehensive response to the enforced disappearance of the young men, we might never even have known about these mass graves and the dimensions of the crisis”, Guevara-Rosas said.
Authorities say corrupt members of the local police in Iguala had abducted the students and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang, which slaughtered them in turn before incinerating their dead bodies.
Relatives of the 43 missing students from the Isidro Burgos rural teachers college march holding pictures of their missing loved ones during a protest in Mexico City, Sunday, July 26, 2015.The search for 43 missing college students in the southern state of Guerrero has turned up at least 60 clandestine graves and 129 bodies over the last 10 months, Mexico’s attorney general’s office says.
Until today, only one of the students’ bodies has been found among the charred remains found in a landfill.
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Of the 25,000 people listed by the government as missing, more than 11,000 of the cases were registered since President Enrique Pena Nieto took office December 1, 2012.
