She prefers sleeveless dresses, adorns her glamorous frame with plenty of bejeweled accessories, and is not oblivious to the benefits of Botox.

In Mexico, they know her as the Queen of Iguala — after the town where she used to live — but she would much rather be celebrated as a doer of good.

Now, it turns out, she might better be described as a mass murderer, implicated in narcotics, extortion and corruption, as well as being a fugitive from Mexican justice.

Meet Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, first lady of the southern Mexican town of Iguala and the reputed mastermind of a searing atrocity that resulted in the disappearance last month of 43 young men, all now presumed dead.

Involving a shocking degree of collusion among politicians, police and drug traders, the mass abduction that unfolded on the night of Sept. 26 in the southern Mexican town of Iguala has triggered national outrage and international consternation, reactions that have only intensified against the backdrop of a so-far-inconclusive criminal investigation.

The whereabouts of the 43 student teachers remain a mystery, as well as a source of ever-mounting horror.

So far, Mexican authorities have discovered several clandestine graves in the vicinity of Iguala, containing numerous bodies — none of which, it seems, corresponds to the specific barbarity carried out in late September.

Haunted by murderous drug cartels, plagued by a deeply entrenched culture of criminal impunity, and infected by what Hannah Arendt long ago described as the banality of evil, Mexico today is a country where you don’t have to hate someone in order to kill them.

A whiff of annoyance will do.

That, it now seems, was all it took for Pineda Villa to order the execution of 43 men.

Wife of the local mayor and head of a municipal family welfare organization, Pineda Villa was evidently concerned that a group of students from a neighbouring teachers’ college might disrupt a celebration she had organized for the evening of Sept. 26 — the occasion of her second annual address concerning her charitable accomplishments.

She had been interrupted by a similar ruckus at a public event in June 2013, and so she reportedly decided to take pre-emptive action this time.

“Teach them a lesson,” she ordered, according to one account.

Her underlings complied.

Now, more than four weeks later, the search for the bodies of the missing men continues. Meanwhile, 56 individuals have been arrested in the case, including 22 police agents from either Iguala or the neighbouring town of Cocutla.

Pineda Villa has fled for parts unknown, along with her husband, Jose Luis Abarca — the now deposed mayor of Iguala — and the town’s police chief, Felipe Flores. All three are presumed to be in hiding.

On Thursday, Abarca’s replacement as mayor — Luis Manzon — quit the post after just seven hours in office, saying he wished to live his life “calmly and in peace.”







Earlier this week, Mexican investigators located a new set of graves in an area called Pueblo Viejo. That is where the students were reportedly taken — in a pickup truck and another vehicle — in order to be executed.

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The abductions in Iguala were not an isolated crime, however, and neither were the circumstances that led to their commission.

“It is a global confession, a collective X-ray, a clarifying revelation of the mechanisms of understanding between the economic powers, in this case so-called organized crime, and the politicians, all of whom, in reality, are one and the same,” wrote journalist Julio Hernandez Lopez in La Jornada.

What follows is the story of an atrocity, as it is told in Iguala, based on federal government statements and reports in the Mexican media.

At 6 p.m. on Sept. 26, a group of student teachers from the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa commandeered a pair of buses owned by the Estrella de Oro bus company. They set out for Mexico City to attend a political rally, meaning to regroup along the way in the town of Iguala, which is controlled by a drug gang known as the United Warriors.

Later that evening, a grab-bag of sentries near Iguala — some were police, others were halcones, or spotters, for the United Warriors — sent a message to the police control centre in the town, warning of the students’ approach.

The order came back almost at once: stop them. The command was said to have been issued by “A-5,” police code for the Iguala mayor and his wife.

Backed by reinforcements from the neighbouring town of Cocutla, the Iguala police attempted to meet the students’ advance with force. Six people — including three students and three others — were killed in the ensuing confrontation. In the confusion, the police also targeted a third bus, which turned out be carrying the players of a third division Mexican soccer team — the Chilpancingo Hornets — all of whom were later released, except for their driver, who was killed by mistake.

The co-operation between police and the United Warriors is no surprise, considering the two were connected by their ties to the Queen of Iguala.

Two of her brothers had been members of the powerful Beltran Leyva drug cartel, prior to their murder in September 2009.

A third sibling — Salomon, a.k.a. El Molon — is a member of the United Warriors, which split away from Beltran Leyva and has been headquartered in Iguala for the past four years, under the leadership of Mario Sidronio Casarrubias, a man closely connected to the former mayor’s wife.

According to Mexico’s federal attorney-general’s office, Pineda Villa paid regular protection money to the drug gang, in monthly installments that ranged from $150,000 to $225,000 (U.S.), of which roughly $45,000 (U.S.) went to the local police force.

When Pineda Villa expressed a desire that the student teachers be taught a lesson, the police listened.

Following their initial deadly confrontation with the students on Sept. 26, the police rounded up 43 of the young men and escorted them to the Iguala police station, where they were placed under the charge of Cesar Nava, deputy police chief of Cocutla.

Nava had the students transported to Pueblo Viejo in a couple of trucks, one of them belonging to El Gil, a pseudonym for the second-in-command of the United Warriors. El Gil used his cellphone to call Casarrubias, his commander, who said the students’ actions that night posed a threat to the drug gang’s control of the area. He gave the order to proceed.

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