At least 43 Mexican student teachers remain unaccounted for, more than two weeks after they were captured by police in an impoverished western region of the country and later turned over to members of a breakaway drug gang called the United Warriors.

Mexican authorities have so far located the charred bodies of some 28 individuals buried in a series of clandestine graves near the town of Iguala, in the same part of Guerrero state where the abductions occurred, but none of these newly discovered bodies corresponds to the missing student teachers, say federal authorities.

“I can tell you that from the first graves that have been found, we already have some results . . . (and) they don’t correspond to the DNA that the family members of these youths have given us,” federal Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam told Mexican journalists this week.

However, Karam was promptly contradicted by members of a team of Argentine technicians charged with identifying the remains.

“We don’t have our own results and we’re going to continue working until we do have our own results,” said a spokesperson for the Argentines, quoted by Proceso magazine. He estimated it would take three more weeks before testing would be completed.

The disagreement played out against a backdrop of shock and outrage as Mexicans across the country struggle to make sense of a perplexing and horrifying series of events that date to at least until June 30, when 22 young people were killed in populous Mexico state, adjoining the capital.

The federal government insists those deaths resulted from a shootout with police, but they more closely resemble a series of cold-blooded executions, according to reports by the Associated Press and the Mexican edition of Esquire magazine.

The most recent incident — resulting in the disappearance of at least 43 and perhaps as many as 57 student teachers — has only deepened Mexican alarm at atrocities committed amid disturbingly close collusion involving police, drug dealers, and politicians.

Iguala mayor Jose Luis Abarca of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution went into hiding almost immediately after the Guerrero kidnappings on Sept. 26. The town’s security chief, Felipe Flores Velazquez, also fled. The whereabouts of both men remain a mystery.

Some 46 people have so far been arrested for their suspected involvement in the disappearances, according to a report in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. They are said to include 22 members of the Iguala police force, as well as 14 police from the neighbouring community of Cocula and 10 civilians, mainly spotters employed by the United Warriors drug gang.

“This is not new,” said political scientist Judith Teichman of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. “Of course, the drug gangs permeate the police departments. They buy them up and corrupt them.”

Mexican TV network Televisa reported this week that Cocula Mayor Cesar Penaloza Santana of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party has also been arrested but did not specify the charges against him.

At least 70,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence since late 2006, when former president Felipe Calderon launched an all-out war on the country’s powerful and deadly drug cartels, recruiting both the army and the navy. According to figures released in 2012, more than 26,000 individuals disappeared during the same period, their fates unknown.

When he took office two years ago, current President Enrique Pena Nieto promised a less confrontational approach to the cartels, with fewer killings, but he has so far failed to deliver, say many observers.

“In practice, there is very little evidence of a shift,” said Maureen Meyer, a Mexico expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “You still have agencies that are not being held accountable.”

No one seems sure why police and drug dealers would target young student teachers for abduction, and possibly worse, but Guerrero state has a long history of political activism, often involving teachers, says Teichman.

Meanwhile, Pena Nieto is pushing a far-reaching program of education reform opposed by many students, educators, and unionists, including many at the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero, the institution attended by the students who disappeared last month.

A day before the abduction, students from the school came under gunfire by police, leaving six demonstrators dead. The students had been protesting against proposed education reforms.

Author of a forthcoming book on Mexico’s cartels, Canadian academic James Creechan speculates the demonstrators may have unwittingly angered narcotics traders by disrupting traffic along the highway linking Mexico City with the Pacific resort of Acapulco, now a major port for drug shipments.

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“The events in Guerrero are a microcosm of all the failures of the Mexican state — corruption, narco-traffic, the failures of the state to protect citizens, the entrenched failures of teacher training, and the inability of the federal government to work with state governments for the common good,” he wrote in an email.

Others say the abductions, and other similar crimes, are fundamentally inexplicable.

“It’s a shocking incident, given the number of students involved,” said Meyer. “There is no rational explanation for this type of event.”

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