Families of Missing Mexican Students Ask Drug Trafficker for Information

MEXICO CITY – Some of the relatives of the 43 education students who disappeared in southern Mexico more than six months ago have asked the suspected leader of the Los Rojos drug cartel, Santiago Mazari Hernandez, to reveal what he knows about the case.

The request was made in a message written on a poster in Iguala, the city where the students went missing on Sept. 26.

The missing students’ relatives told the drug trafficker, who is the subject of an arrest warrant, that they were willing to meet with him.

The poster was a response to several banners, known as “narcomantas” in Mexico, that appeared a few weeks ago bearing messages from Mazari, who said he was not involved in the students’ disappearance and blamed the government for covering up the truth.

“We ask you to please help us find the whereabouts of our children because this bad government has not been serious with us. On the contrary, it has hurt us with its lies. We are poor people and they have trampled our dignity,” the poster said.

Bernabe Abrajan, the father of one of the missing students, told Efe the poster was legitimate and no response had been received from the cartel.

Dozens of suspects, including police officers and public officials, have been arrested in connection with the events in Iguala on the night of Sept. 26, when municipal police fired gunshots at students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, a nearby teacher-training facility.

Six people died that night, 25 were wounded and 43 students were detained by police and then handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

Three suspects in the case – Patricio Reyes, Jhonatan Osorio and Agustin Garcia – confessed to having killed the students and burned their bodies.

Reyes, Osorio and Garcia told investigators they took the 43 students to the Cocula dump and set them on fire.

Former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said in a press conference on Jan. 27 that there was sufficient scientific evidence to conclude that the students were murdered and their bodies burned by Guerreros Unidos drug cartel members at the dump in Cocula, with the ashes dumped in the San Juan River.

The Guerreros Unidos gang mistook the students for members of the Los Rojos cartel, said Murillo Karam, who left office on Feb. 26