SAN MIGUEL TECOMATLAN, Mexico (AP) – Unlike the families of the 43 students who disappeared a year ago, Julio Cesar Mondragon’s loved ones were left with a body to bury. But there is little comfort in that, because Mondragon’s corpse bore witness to the horror of his final moments.
His autopsy showed several skull fractures, internal bleeding and other injuries consistent with torture. His face had been flayed, a tactic often used by the drug cartels to incite terror. Photos of his bloody skull were uploaded to the Internet.
International attention has been focused on the 43 students who vanished a year ago Saturday, but six others died at the hands of police in those hours, including Mondragon, a 22-year-old father of a 2-year-old. According to an independent group of experts, the disappearances and the killings were the result of a long, coordinated attack against students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa who had come to the southern city of Iguala to commandeer buses for a protest.
But the events of last Sept. 26 were far from isolated. Some 25,000 people have been reported missing in Mexico since 2007, and hundreds from the Iguala area in the last year alone. The disappearance of the students has drawn attention to others who have been lost, as well as brutal drug cartels, official corruption, government indifference and languishing legal cases.
According to Mexico’s attorney general, the 43 disappeared in an attack by police and the Guerreros Unidos drug gang because they were mistaken for rival gang members. The attorney general said last November they were killed and burned to ash in a giant pyre in the nearby Cocula garbage dump.