IGUALA, MEXICO—Few in Mexico’s southern state of Guerrero believe the 43 students of the teacher’s school of Ayotzinapa, who went missing almost two weeks ago, are still alive.

Yesterday Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general, announced the discovery of yet another four graves near Iguala, the town in northern Guerrero where the students went missing on Sept. 26 after members of the local police with suspected ties to a criminal gang fired upon them.

The new graves are apparently located just a stone’s throw from five other graves found last weekend that contained 28 bodies. It’s still not clear how many bodies were discovered yesterday, he said, and establishing their identity will most likely take forensic investigators several weeks.

Murillo Karam also said four more arrests were made in connection with the missing students, bringing the total number of suspects to 34. Of those, 26 are members of Iguala’s municipal police corps suspected of having ties with the Guerreros Unidos gang.

José Luis Abarca Velázquez, Iguala’s mayor, is still at large, as is the municipal police chief. Both are suspected of involvement in the shootout and disappearance of the students, but Mexico City newspaper Reforma reported this morning that a judge in the capital apparently suspended any arrest warrant against the mayor after he filed an injunction last Monday.

It is still unclear why the students were fired upon and later disappeared. Students, teachers and sympathizers took to the streets last week in 64 cities in Mexico and abroad. Many attending the demonstrations claimed the students, who attend a leftist school known for its social activism and constant clashes with the authorities over education reform, were the victims of political persecution.

“Their disappearance is the result of a constant campaign of hatred of the authorities against activist teachers and students,” says Josefina Becerril, a teacher who protested with more than 10,000 other people in Guerrero’s state capital of Chilpancingo.

Others believe the students got caught up in a turf battle between the Guerreros Unidos and Los Rojos, a rival gang. Guerrero has long been a focal point of Mexico’s brutal drug war, which has cost an estimated 80,000 lives since 2006.

Employees say recovering the bodies from the new graves may well take several days. “The slopes that lead to the graves are extremely steep. You almost have to climb to get there,” says one morgue employee, who helped transport the bodies from the first graves last week and spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. “Imagine how hard it is to bring a body bag down. The investigators also can’t work at night because of the darkness.”

During a march this week in Guadalajara in support of the missing students, a little girl holds a sign reading, "They were taken alive, we want them back alive." REUTERS/Alejandro Acosta

Even though it’s still unclear whether the bodies in Iguala’s mass graves belong to the students, hope that they will be found alive is fading quickly. Over the past few days, hundreds of members of UPOEG, an organization of indigenous communities in Guerrero, have been scouring the area around Iguala, trying to track down clues as to the whereabouts of the students. But according to Crisoforo García, one of the coordinators of the search, they found nothing that would indicate any of the students is still alive.

“All we found were clothes and some bullet shells near the first series of clandestine graves, but nothing else,” García says. “But we’ll continue the search in days to come. We have our people working in shifts.”

To the families of the students, who are temporarily lodged at the school in Ayotzinapa, not far from Guerrero’s state capital of Chilpancingo, waiting for news is agonizing. “Thinking about my child is driving me crazy,” says Margarito Ramírez, whose son Carlos is among the missing. “The families are in a bad way. They’re crying, hardly sleeping at all. But I still have hope my son will be found. Hope is all we have now.”