Guardian News and Media/Mexico City
The search for 43 student teachers who went missing in Mexico a month ago is now focusing on a gully on the edge of a municipal rubbish dump.
Photographs of the site in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero were released on Tuesday after a small group of journalists were taken behind a heavily policed cordon.
They show people in white jump suits working at the bottom of the gully reportedly about 10m deep and reachable only with the help of ropes.
They appear to be working on the surface and there are no signs of bodies.
Milenio newspaper said the area was now peppered with little red flags.
The dump lies just outside the small town of Cocula, about 10 miles from the city of Iguala where municipal police and unidentified gunmen attacked the students from a famously radical teacher training college on September 26.
Six people died and dozens of students went missing, many of them after being driven away by police.
They were allegedly handed over to Guerreros Unidos, a local drug gang.
Jesus Murillo, the attorney general, last week said the order to pursue the students came directly from the mayor of Iguala who feared the students were planning to disrupt a speech by his wife who has been identified as a key operator for the drug gang.
The mayor and his wife are now on the run.
Murillo told reporters on Monday that the authorities were led to the dump because of declarations made by four new detainees, taking the total of people arrested in relation to the case to 56.
Using characteristically cryptic language, Murillo stressed that the new detainees were the first to have confessed to direct participation in “the disappearance and the fate of this large group of people”.
He did not specify what that fate was, but promised that the authorities were putting all their energy into corroborating whether it was true. The authorities have already dug up at least 38 corpses, many of them badly burned, from another 11 graves on the outskirts of Iguala itself.
DNA tests showed they were not the bodies of the students, although doubts about the quality of the samples used mean more tests are under way.
The events in Guerrero have laid bare the extent to which local authorities in some parts of Mexico have become intertwined with organised criminal groups, exploding the government’s claims to be bringing Mexico’s eight-year-old drug wars under control.
