Then came Iguala, a small semi-desert town in Guerrero State in the Mexican southwest. On the evening of Sept.26, police intercepted buses carrying dozens of students from a nearby teachers college to town for a protest. What happened next is still unclear, but apparently Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, fearing the rebel students would sabotage his wife’s speech in the town square, reportedly called on amigos in the local narco gang, Guerreros Unidos, said to be on the city payroll. When the night was over, six people lay dead and 43 students were missing, now presumed murdered.Abarca and First Lady Maria de Los Angeles Pineda fled but were arrested on the outskirts of Mexico City. Federal troops have yet to locate the missing students, but everywhere they look, they stumble on clandestine graves. Public horror has turned to fury, sparking a nationwide revolt that led to the ouster of Guerrero’s governor.Now Pena Nieto is scrambling to rescue not just his own mandate but Mexico’s best chance at modernization in decades. Pena Nieto had set out to modernize crime fighting by centralizing policing and corrections under the powerful Interior Ministry, and unifying the country’s confusing patchwork of regional penal codes.
That strategy paid off, including the capture earlier this year of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s dreaded drug overlord. Overall, homicides fell 13 percent last year over the year before, and Pena Nieto recently stated that murders were down too.
These advances have emboldened Pena Nieto who hoped to distance himself from his hawkish predecessor, Felipe Calderon, whose offensive against the narcos had claimed 60,000 lives from 2006 to 2012.
Nearly 94 per cent of Mexico’s crimes go unsolved. Patriotic Mexicans once surrendered their wedding rings and gold to pay off the national debt when foreign oil assets were nationalized; now they don’t wear jewelry so they won’t be mugged.
No one is saying Pena Nieto’s courageous reforms are finished, but the new Mexico will mean little as long as the shock of the old persists.