EL PERICON, Mexico – A steady stream of neighbors, friends and classmates stepped into the half-light of Ezequiel Mora’s two-room adobe home Sunday to offer their condolences for the death of his son Alexander, the first of 43 missing college students to be confirmed dead.
In gray slacks, a navy blue shirt and leather sandals, Mora received his visitors with red, sleepless eyes, accepting their words with a slight nod and a lingering degree of disbelief.
Alexander Mora Venancio had dreamed of becoming a physical-education teacher, an ambitious goal for a kid from this tiny agricultural community deep in the mountains of the Costa Chica region of Guerrero state.
“They took my son’s dream,” Mora said.
Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam confirmed Sunday that the son had been identified from charred remains found several weeks ago near a garbage dump in Cocula, Guerrero. The DNA was matched from material extracted from a bone fragment and analyzed by forensics experts at a laboratory in Innsbruck, Austria.
“He was a classmate who was very strong, very persevering in whatever he had as a goal,” student leader Omar Garcia said of Venancio. “It’s a big loss.”
The attorney general said 80 people have been arrested so far, including 44 police officers from the cities of Iguala and Cocula and former Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca, who is under investigation for ordering the Sept. 26 attacks. The case also forced the governor of Guerrero to resign.
The identification confirmed what Murillo Karam told parents in November: that the students rounded up in a conflict with police had been killed and incinerated by the local drug gang, Guerreros Unidos. Horror, hope – and the lack of positively identified remains – led parents to discount the story, saying they would keep searching and expected to find their children alive.
In El Pericon, people say drug gangs ran the area until two years ago, killing, kidnapping and extorting at will. That changed when the people rose up and organized their own security forces, fed up with the ineffectual government police.
On Sunday, a young man with a rifle slung over his shoulder leaned against a pile of sandbags just behind Mora’s home. In a side yard, women from the town prepared pots of pozole, hominy soup, over open fires, while across the street boys practiced a folk dance to a steady drumbeat under a pavilion.
Mora said his son was not one to hang out in the streets. He devoted himself above all to soccer, and his yellow jersey lay at the center of an altar of candles and flowers in Mora’s home.