Detectives looking for missing students in Mexico have disappeared

Two detectives looking for 43 students who went missing almost 10 years ago have themselves disappeared in Mexico’s Pacific coast state of Guerrero, Mexico’s president said Tuesday.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that a search effort has been launched to find the two federal detectives, a man and a woman. Speaking at his daily news briefing, López Obrador said “I hope this is not related to those who do not want us to find the youths.”

The disappearances were the latest sign of what appeared to be a generalized breakdown in law and order in Guerrero state, home to the resort of Acapulco. The state has been dogged for a decade by the case of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college in Guerrero who disappeared in 2014 and are believed to have been abducted by local officials and turned over to a drug gang to be killed.

Students at that college, located in Tixtla, north of Acapulco, have a long history of demonstrating and clashing with police, and last week a student was shot to death in what police said was a confrontation with students riding in a stolen car.

One of the police officers involved in that shooting had been detained and placed under investigation in the case, after the president described the shooting as “an abuse of authority” and confirmed the dead student had not fired any gun.

But López Obrador acknowledged Tuesday that the state police officer detained in the case had escaped from state custody before being turned over to federal prosecutors.

The president suggested that Guerrero state police had not properly guarded their colleague, saying arrest “protocols had not been followed.”

Adding to the confusion, the state prosecutors’ office denied Tuesday that the officer had ever been in custody.

And there was little evidence that the president’s pledges to investigate last week’s shooting — or the fate of the missing 43 — would placate the students’ traditionally violent protests.

On Tuesday, student demonstrators broke into state prosecutors’ offices in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, set off explosives and burned 11 police patrol vehicles. The prosecutors’ office said four of its employees were injured in the attack.

The 43 missing male students are believed to have been killed and burned by drug gang members. The two missing detectives were part of a years-long effort to find where the students’ remains had been dumped. López Obrador did not specify when the detectives disappeared.