Group continues search for missing students in southern Mexico

Mexico City, Nov 25 (EFE).- The group of civilians leading the search for 43 Mexican students that went missing almost two months ago, reported finding common graves in the southern city of Iguala, a site that their attorney, Manuel Vazquez, calls a "clandestine cemetery."

The search team, headed by members of the missing students' families and the Union of Peoples and Organizations of Guerrero State, or UPOEG, found 10 graves near that city, seven of them containing skeletal remains and the others with blood-soaked clothing.

"These are not even clandestine graves, there's a clandestine cemetery in Iguala," Vazquez, who represents UPOEG, told Efe.

UPOEG is a group of armed civilians founded in January 2013 in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero as a means of self-defense against drug traffickers.

The group of civilians looking for the 43 students from the rural teachers' school in Ayotzinapa believes they will be found alive based on the accounts of local inhabitants.

On Sept. 26, municipal police opened fire on the young people, presumably following orders of the then-mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, killing six people and wounding another 25.

That night another 43 students were detained by police and handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, which allegedly killed and burned them to cover their tracks, according to the statements of three members of the criminal organization after their arrest.

"We have to thoroughly investigate the town because the government says they have been burned (according to the testimony of the alleged perpetrators) but we don't believe they're dead at all. We do, however, respect the investigation they are carrying out," Vazquez said.

"People say they're alive and we believe in the word of the people, the folks who live here and see what's going on, so for us those students are alive and that's why we keep looking for them," Vazquez said in an telephone interview.

The families, which also refuse to believe that their children are dead, are waiting for the results of DNA tests being done in a laboratory in Austria of skeletal remains found in a garbage dump and a river in Cocula municipality near Iguala.

Since the search began last October in Iguala and the surrounding area, UPOEG has found dozens of bodies in clandestine graves.

"We have no number (of the bodies) because we immediately notified the government about all the graves that we found and they are the ones who did the digging," Vazquez said.