|
| FILE - In this May 8, 2014 file photo, the mayor of the city of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, right, and his wife Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa meet with state government officials in Chilpancingo, Mexico. Federal police early Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014 detained the couple, who are accused of ordering the Sept. 26 attacks on teachers' college students that left six dead and 43 still missing. The Iguala police chief is still a fugitive. |
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexico's most-wanted couple, accused of
running their town as a drug fiefdom and ordering an attack that killed
six and left 43 college students missing, were caught Tuesday in a
rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Mexico City where they were hiding.
Federal
police seized Jose Luis Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles
Pineda, in a raid before dawn in Iztapalapa, a working-class
neighborhood of the capital. It was a far fall from their reign of
wealth and power as the mayor and first lady of Iguala, a town in
southern Guerrero state where the students from a teachers' college went
missing Sept. 26, allegedly at the hands of police and a drug cartel.
Even
as they were hauled off to the Attorney General's organized crime unit
to give their statements, the capture did nothing to answer the biggest
mystery: Where are the students? Their disappearance, and the failure to
make progress in the case, has ignited protests across the country and
broadsided President Enrique Pena Nieto's efforts to paint violence in
Mexico as a thing of the past.
"News like this
just makes you angrier," said Mario Cesar Gonzalez, whose son, Cesar
Manuel Gonzalez, is among the missing students. "I wish they would put
the same intelligence services and effort into finding the students. The
ineptitude is staggering."
Authorities have
uncovered mass graves and the remains of 38 people, but none has been
identified as the missing students. Besides Tuesday's arrests, at least
56 other people have been taken into custody, and the Iguala police
chief is also being sought.
Some hoped the couple's detention would provide new leads.
"This
was the missing piece. This arrest will help us find our kids," Felipe
de la Cruz, the father of one of the missing students, told Milenio
television. "It was the government who took our kids."
No
shots were fired in Tuesday's raid on three houses, including the one
in which the couple was hiding, according to a federal official who
spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak
to the media.
One of the houses was a run-down stucco structure with cracked and stained walls and men's jeans hanging out to dry.
Attorney
General Jesus Murillo Karam said 60 federal agents had staked out the
three houses, and were tipped off to the couple's presence by a female
associate, Noemi Berumen, who apparently accompanied the couple or aided
them in their flight from justice. Berumen was also detained in the
Tuesday raids.
"The house they were found in
looked as it were abandoned," Murillo Karam said. "The reason we started
to suspect this person (Berumen) was that she appeared to be entering
an abandoned house. "
Before they fled last
month, the couple ran Iguala like a fiefdom in cooperation with the
local drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos. Abarca received up to $220,000
every few weeks as bribe money and to pay off his corrupt police force,
according to Attorney General Jose Murillo Karam, who gave a detailed
account last month of the couple's alleged collusion with organized
crime.
The mayor's wife was a major operator
in the cartel, an offshoot of the Beltran Leyva gang, Murillo Karam
said. Two of her brothers were on former President Felipe Calderon's
most-wanted drug trafficker list until they were killed in 2009. A third
brother, Salomon Pineda, was believed to run the territory in northern
Guerrero state for the cartel.
Guerreros
Unidos has 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, according to a federal official.
The
students attended a radical rural teachers college with a history of
carrying out protests. They had gained the enmity of Abarca because of a
previous demonstration in the town, Murillo Karam said. Abarca believed
they planned to disrupt a speech by his wife, who aspired to succeed
him as mayor, and ordered police to detain the students after they
hijacked four buses to provide transportation to a coming protest.
Three students were shot dead in the confrontation and later three bystanders were killed in a separate attack.
Police
then picked up the other students and took them to the nearby town of
Cocula, Murillo Karam said. At some point they were loaded aboard a dump
truck and taken - apparently still alive - to an area on the outskirts
of Iguala where some mass graves have been found, he said.
In
statements to the media soon after the disappearance, Abarca maintained
that he spent the evening of Sept. 26 dining out, and that he ordered
police to leave the students alone.
Detained
gang leader Sidronio Casarrubias told authorities one of his lieutenants
told him the students were sympathizers of a rival gang, the attorney
general said.
The search for the students has
taken authorities to the hills above Iguala and to a gully near a trash
dump in the neighboring city of Cocula, but still no remains have been
identified.
Abarca and his wife amassed
jewelry stores and other properties believed bought with illicit funds,
including a shopping mall that was vandalized in one of the many
protests against the failure to solve the students' disappearance.
Authorities said they ruled with fear. Pineda was overheard telling one
of Abarca's political rivals, "You don't know who you're messing with."
Days later he turned up dead. Witnesses said Abarca himself did the
killing.
| ||
|
