Watch Photo-Journalist Matt Black's 'Guerrero: The Monster in the Mountains' 4News
go to original July 21, 2015

On September 26, 2014, 43 trainee teachers were taken into custody by police in Iguala, a small city in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. None has been seen or heard from since.

Although the Mexican government officially closed its investigation, the remains of only one student, Alexander Mora Venancio, 19, has subsequently been identified, writes US photo-journalist Matt Black.

"I think the devil is punishing Mexico with great fury," Pope Francis said in an interview broadcasted six months after the students' disappearance.

But for Guerrero, which suffers Mexico's highest murder rate and is the second poorest state in the country, the devil must be saving a special rage: in the hills above Iguala, the search for the missing students has revealed a landscape littered with clandestine graves, which are thought to contain the remains of at least 400 local people reported as disappeared.

Galvanized by the loss of the students and enraged by officials' alleged complicity in their disappearance, scores of armed self-defense groups in the state's rural villages have stepped up their patrols.

Read the rest at 4News

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