Mexico arrest of fugitive mayor may shed light on missing

students
The capture Tuesday of a fugitive Mexican mayor suspected of ordering the
disappearance of 43 college students raises expectations of progress in the
unsuccessful five-week-long search for the missing men.
But it also is probably making several politicians and other officials
nervous, given their long-standing tolerance of even support for the
mayor and his wife, despite her well-known connection to drug traffickers.
Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, were arrested
by an elite unit of federal police before dawn in a modest neighborhood of
Mexico City, police spokesman Jose Ramon Salinas said. Their detention
came more than a month after the mayor took a leave of absence in the
Guerrero city of Iguala and the couple went on the lam.
They were transported to installations of the federal attorney generals
office that specialize in organized-crime investigations, where they were
being interrogated, authorities said.
In a brief appearance before journalists, Atty. Gen. Jesus Murillo Karam
said investigators were able to pinpoint the couples whereabouts because
they chose to hide in a house that appeared abandoned. A third person was
arrested for helping them hide, Murillo said.
Monte Alejandro Rubido, the national security commissioner, said
investigators traced the couples relatives and associates and narrowed the
search to Mexico City and Monterrey.

Rogelio Ortega, the acting governor of Guerrero, predicted that the

detention of Abarca would serve as a key piece to the puzzle of the missing
students.
The capture represents the possibility of finding substantive clues of what
really happened and [could allow] a more precise search, Ortega told the
Televisa television network.
He said the couples statements could also lead to the fall of other
politicians.

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Parents of the missing students welcomed the arrest of the man they blame
for their children's disappearance but said locating the students should
remain the authorities priority.
For us, this is news that will assure us that we will get our young people
back; it was the piece that was missing, Felipe de la Cruz, a father, told
Milenio TV.

Searches thus far of miles of rural terrain, based in part on information

from detained suspects, have turned up mass graves but not the students.
Abarca took a leave of absence after the students, last seen being led away
by local police, went missing Sept. 26 and just before the discovery by
federal authorities of about a dozen hidden graves on the outskirts of
Iguala. He and his wife, the sister of two late lieutenants in the Beltran
Leyva drug cartel, quickly vanished and had been sought by federal
authorities since.

Related Story: Mexico focuses on new mass grave in students'

disappearance
Atty. Gen. Murillo last month said the couple were believed to have ordered
local police to intercept and do away with the students, from a rural college
for the poor, who were en route to Iguala and might have planned to
disrupt a party and speech by Pineda.
The case soon revealed the deep infiltration by drug gangs of police and
City Hall in Iguala, about 80 miles south of Mexico City, and in other
municipalities in Guerrero state. The governor, Angel Aguirre, was forced
to resign amid the scandal, which has also handed President Enrique Pea
Nieto his worst security crisis in nearly two years of government.

More than 50 people have been arrested in connection with the

disappearances, the majority of them police officers or members of the local
drug gang Guerreros Unidos, all of whom authorities say were working in
cahoots. Murillo said confessions from some of the detained revealed that
Pineda was the principal operator of Guerreros Unidos in Iguala.
cComments

@straightspeaking. Mexico has been a failed state ever since it gained its

independence from Spain in 1821. But Mexico is a country too proud to admit that it is
steeped in political turmoil since it gained its independence from Spainish control.

JAY EDGAR H.
AT 8:24 AM NOVEMBER 10, 2014

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36

There was already bad blood between students from the college and the
Iguala leadership. Students trashed City Hall last year after the slaying of a
leftist social activist. His wife, Sofia Mendoza, a City Council member,
blames Abarca for that killing.
Abarca and Aguirre are members of the leftist Democratic Revolution
Party, or PRD, in opposition to Pea Nietos Institutional Revolutionary
Party. Several top leaders of the left who had given Abarca their support
have now distanced themselves from the tainted mayor.
The attorney general's office presumably investigated and cleared Abarca
when he ran for mayor in 2012. Lazaro Mazon, a former Guerrero health
secretary often described as Abarcas political godfather, has been
nominated by a major leftist party to be a candidate for governor. And

questions abound over who gave Abarca the heads-up that allowed him to
leave Iguala ahead of federal authorities.
The network of complicity is very extensive and must be investigated to the
fullest, said Guillermo Anaya, a federal congressman with the conservative
National Action Party.
But many in Mexico say the Guerrero violence is only the latest, albeit an
especially egregious, abuse by government security forces and other corrupt
practices that the Pea Nieto administration has sought to downplay.
The federal government maintains a strategy to avoid any kind of
responsibility in this tragedy, Vidal Llerenas, a PRD legislator for Mexico
City, said in a debate sponsored by the Animal Politico news website.
They pretend this is an exclusively local problem, product of an
irresponsible governor and a left that doesnt have control of its
candidates, he said.
The president, Llerenas said, does not assume responsibility for the failure
of federal security agencies nor does he propose reforms for citizens
security.... It is a lack of leadership.
Eluding a manhunt, Abarca and his wife had rented a home in the capitals
Iztapalapa district, and the owner may have turned them in, the newspaper
El Universal reported. An elite unit of federal police arrested the pair
without resistance, authorities said.
Iztapalapa, a densely populated working-class area, represented a
surprising come-down for the high-living couple. Police found them in a
shabby gray concrete home, a marked contrast to their fancy, well-guarded
digs in Iguala.

Seven little dogs were inside, including one with a plastic cone around its
head, a sign it had recently been attended at a veterinarians office.
The Mexican media dubbed them the Imperial Couple because of the
heavy-handed and self-entitled way they ran Iguala, according to many
locals. Pineda is said by many to have been the one calling the shots. She
was forceful at City Council meetings, speaking out to defend her husband
even though her only official position was as honorary head of a family
welfare agency.
She already had been tapped by the party to run as the next mayor of
Iguala.
Abarca also had fans, primarily those who shared in the couples lucrative
business deals. He showered supporters with his largesse paved streets,
drainage pipes using money whose source was a mystery. He started as a
producer of straw hats and, more recently after his marriage to Pineda,
became owner of fancy shopping galleries and jewelry stores and at least 37
homes and other properties, registered in the names of the couples
children, authorities say.

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About 36 bodies have been recovered from the hidden graves, but none so
far have been identified as missing students, whose disappearance has
galvanized a broad-based protest movement.
A huge march by 43 organizations from Iguala to Mexico City started
Monday. Calling themselves 43 for 43, they planned to arrive in the capital
within a week