Mexico's focus on power couple, drug dirt and 43 vanished students

Mexicans are putting pressure on the authorities to find out what happened to the 43 students in Iguala. Photo / AP

Beneath the stars as dusk fell, Maria de los Angeles Pineda and her husband were dancing. But then came word that a demonstration was forming in the town plaza.

The wife of the Iguala mayor was not going to let a student protest ruin her day, in which she had staged a public display of her charity work. So her orders to the security chief who had brought the news of the planned protest were concise, according to police documents leaked to Mexican newspaper El Universal.

The group of 80 students on the way to the plaza were from a highly politicised left-wing teacher training college, who hated her husband's rule in the southern Mexican town.

"Teach them a lesson," she said.

By midnight, six of them were dead and 17 injured. A bus carrying a school football team mistakenly drove through the melee, resulting in 200 bullets in the side of their vehicle and the death of David Josue, 15. And 43 students had disappeared.

Late last week, Jose Luis Abarca, the mayor, was officially removed, and the federal police have taken over from the municipal forces - 22 of their number have been arrested so far - in overseeing a manhunt for the couple. Pineda and her husband are on the run, having not been seen since September 30 - four days after the students disappeared.

The case is a major test of the resolve of Enrique Pena Nieto, the Mexican President, to combat organised crime. He was elected two years ago with a mandate to end the wave of violence, which has claimed 100,000 lives since 2006.

"The disappearances are a human rights crisis of major proportions for Mexico," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "But the Pena Nieto Administration has fallen woefully short of its commitment to find out what happened to these thousands of missing people."

The United Nations described it as "one of the most terrible events of recent times". Jesus Murillo Karam, Mexico's Attorney-General, said Iguala's police seem to have been "hit men" for a drugs cartel called Guerreros Unidos. Leaked documents show just how closely linked the family was to organised crime.

Two of Pineda's brothers worked for a cartel, but were executed for apparently betraying their leaders.

Another of her brothers, Salomon Pineda, was arrested a fortnight ago, accused of being a senior member of Guerreros Unidos, responsible for delivering the majority of Chicago's heroin and marijuana.

This month a woman who is supposedly Pineda's mother was filmed being questioned, blindfolded, in a video posted on YouTube. "What relation does Guerreros Unidos have with the mayor of Iguala?" the unseen interrogator asks.

"My son-in-law protects them, in return for a monthly payment of 2 million pesos [$186,115]," she replies.

The revelations come as little surprise to the 130,000 inhabitants of Iguala.

The town, in a valley surrounded by wooded hills, has emerged as a key route for traffickers.

As a result, the state has the highest murder rate in Mexico: 63 people per 100,000 - more than three times the national average. The hills often ring with the sound of shovels, as mass graves are excavated.