MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office has confirmed the arrest of a former deputy police chief who is a suspected member of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel and is linked to the disappearance of 43 trainee teachers in the southern state of Guerrero.Cesar Nava Gonzalez, ex-deputy police chief of the town of Cocula, Guerrero, had been on the lam since shortly after Sept. 26, when police attacked students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School, a nearby teacher’s college, leaving six dead, 25 wounded and 43 missing in the town of Iguala, the AG’s office said in a statement.
Corrupt police officers from Iguala and Cocula detained those 43 students that night and handed them over to the Guerreros Unidos gang, which killed them and burned the bodies to eliminate all traces of the victims, Mexican authorities say, citing statements by suspects in the case.
But the parents of the missing young people say they won’t accept that explanation without solid proof.
Nava Gonzalez went into hiding in Mexico City and later in Colima, capital of that likenamed Pacific coast state, where he was arrested, the AG’s office said.
Family members of the missing students and trainees at the teacher’s college are to meet Saturday to plan their next steps in their search for justice.
Mexican authorities have made dozens of arrests in the case, including detaining the purported head of the Guerreros Unidos cartel and the mayor of Iguala, whose town hall and police force had allegedly been infiltrated by organized crime.
Corrupt municipal police targeted the students, according to some media accounts, after they had seized several buses for use in protests against education reform.
The case has sparked widespread protests in Mexico.
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