bad news out of Guerrero

These photos are not exactly of the cuota, where you would presumably be travelling. Many people, including us, travel this route often without any problems whatsoever. Put it this way....what would you leave the trans-Canada and head off into the bush?

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Linda from Canada
check out my books at www.livingthedreaminmexico.com AND please have a look at www.cookingwithclaudiainzihuatanejo.blogspot.com as well as www.albertoinzihuatanejo.blogspot.com

As a Gringo, you are far safer in Mexico than a Mexican. Provided you don't do anything foolish. Like driving off into the unknown, on back roads.

A couple of years ago the students closed the highway between Morelia and Patzquaro and burned busses and police cars. We had done a tour of the villages in the morning and when returning in the evening to Morelia they had blocked both directions of traffic and were intimidating you for donations to get by. The police was at the both ends of the students but were doing nothing. Our driver was afraid not to make a donation.

What's with radical teachers 2B?

Excuse me? Regardless of what differing mindsets may believe about these students' perceived grievances, it seems that it's the police who are demonstrating radical behavior in skilling at least 6 students and disappearing some 40 or more others. Apparently no police were killed or suffered bullet wounds in the incident.

Iguala (Mexico) (AFP) - Gang hitmen linked to police admitted to killing 17 of 43 students missing in southern Mexico, prosecutors said Sunday, amid fears the victims were among 28 bodies found in a mass grave.

Related Stories

1. Mexico checks if 43 students in mass grave AFP
2. Fourteen of 57 missing Mexican students found alive AFP
3. Mass grave found in Mexico raising fears it could hold bodies of missing students Christian Science Monitor
4. Bodies found in Mexico town where students vanished AFP
5. Site of Mexico mass grave is 'land of the wicked' AFP

Inaky Blanco, the chief prosecutor of violence-plagued Guerrero state, said it would take at least 15 days to identify the 28 bodies, some of which were badly burned and in pieces.

The clandestine grave was found Saturday in Pueblo Viejo, an impoverished district of the city of Iguala, where the 43 students were last seen on the night of September 26, some 200 kilometers (125 miles) south of Mexico City.

"A bed of branches and tree trunks was made, on which the bodies of the victims were laid and a flammable substance was used," Blanco said.

The case could become one of the worst slaughters that Mexico has witnessed since the drug war intensified in 2006, leaving 80,000 people dead to date, and by far the most horrific since President Enrique Pena Nieto took office in December 2012.

- Parents hold out hope -

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Students walk past an altar in memory of killed and …
Students walk past an altar in memory of killed and missing peers in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state, Mex …

Earlier Sunday, some parents and hundreds of fellow students from the missing group's teacher training college blocked the highway between Guerrero's capital Chilpancingo and Acapulco, voicing anger at the authorities.

Some of the parents said they were shown pictures of the bodies but that they did not believe that they looked like their children.

"As parents, we reject this situation. It's not the youngsters. We know they're holding them alive," said Manuel Martinez, whose son is among the missing.

The grim find came a week after the students disappeared when gang-linked municipal police shot at buses they had seized to return home from Iguala, where survivors say they had conducted fundraising activities.

In all, three students were killed in the shooting and another three people died when suspected gang members shot at a football team's bus outside Iguala later that night.

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Mexican marines arrive at the site of a mass grave …
Mexican marines arrive at the site of a mass grave in Pueblo Viejo, on the outskirts of Iguala, Guer …

Witnesses say several students, who are from a teacher training college known as a hotbed of radical protests, were whisked away in police vehicles.

Blanco reiterated at a news conference in Acapulco that Iguala's police force had links to the Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors), one of the state's many ultra-violent gangs.

It was Iguala's public security chief, Francisco Salgado Valladares, who ordered two gang members to go to the site of the students' buses, Blanco said.

The two hitmen then received instructions from a gang leader known as "El Chucky" to take the students and kill them, he said.

The gangsters made students come out of a bus, "they grabbed 17, took them to the top of a hill in Pueblo Viejo where they have clandestine graves and where they say they killed them," Blanco said.

- 'Land of the wicked' -

Authorities have issued arrest warrants for the town's mayor and security chief, both of who have disappeared.

Some 30 people have been detained over the shootings, including at least 22 police officers.

Authorities said the mass grave was located following the interrogation of some of the suspects. Soldiers cordoned off the area but officials said the pit was up a steep hill filled with thick vegetation.

In Pueblo Viejo, a hamlet surrounded by forests and mountains, a resident said the region is dominated by gangsters and that he had seen municipal police officers going up the hill in recent days, before authorities discovered the mass grave.

"They were going up there back and forth," said the resident, Jose Garcia, pointing to a location between two mountains where the graves were found. "This is the land of the wicked."

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ZIHUATANEJO- A QUAINT LITTLE DRINKING VILLAGE WITH A FISHING PROBLEM.

Today's New York Times has a front page article on this story. You can read it on-line at nytimes.com CNN also has a story, including an account by a survivor from the soccer team. I thought he was incredibly brave to say what he did.

Any sugestions of a safer route to take in the next two weeks if coming down the coast . Thanks

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Billy