Outside the teacher training college in Ayotzinapa is a poignant reminder of tragedy, a memorial to 43 Raúl Isidro Burgos students who “disappeared” last September, almost certainly murdered. “In the outdoor basketball court 43 empty chairs sit in rows,” correspondent Michael McCaughan wrote, “a photo on each, while candles flicker and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is imprinted on a blackboard.”
McCaughan's reports in this paper over the last few days painted a vivid, disturbing picture of Mexico's descent into a bloody quasi-civil war, and particularly of Guerrero, its most violent state, where murderous criminal gangs have become ubiquitous, penetrating politics, police, and business with near impunity. The killings of the 43, which profoundly shocked a country almost inured to the violence, happened after they were arrested by police in the city of Iguala and handed over to the gang Guerreros Unidos on the orders of the mayor, currently under arrest.
Since the launch in 2006 of a crackdown on Mexico’s criminal gangs, more than 100,000 people have died and 25,000 have disappeared. It is estimated that more than 95 per cent of crimes go unreported to the untrusted police while the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful criminal organisation, reportedly has some 3,000 legally constituted companies. Although there have been significant successes – notably the arrest last week of notorious leader of the Knights Templar drug gang, Servando Gomez – President Enrique Peña Nieto is struggling.
Elected in 2012 at the head of Mexico's Party of the Institutional Revolution, he admitted yesterday to the Financial Times that his economic reform programme – the opening up of the state energy monopoly to private investment, the closing of corporate tax loopholes, and the breaking up of telecoms oligopolies – remains very much a prisoner to success in improving law and order. His campaign vow to "leave old practices behind" seems yet to rings hollow, and two major attempts to curtail money laundering by drug gangs appear to have had little effect.