Rage and Sorrow Flow as Student in Mexico Is Declared Dead

             A 19-year-old Alexander who had sought escape from the farming life to become a teacher,confirm dead now and it seems highly likely that the other missing students are dead, too.on the case of 43 students missing since September. “Then they told me it was my son, and that he was dead.”

On Sunday, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam confirmed that a laboratory in Austria had matched a bone fragment found among charred remains to Alexander Mora’s DNA. The result provides strong evidence for the theory that the students were killed and burned to ashes. Witnesses have told investigators that the local police abducted the students and turned them over to a gang on behalf of a corrupt mayor in conflict with them.

Mr. Murillo Karam said 80 people had been arrested in the case so far and that 16 more were being sought.

President Enrique Peña Nieto, who is suffering the worst crisis in his two-year term, has promised justice and unveiled a series of changes that would disband most municipal police forces and place them under the control of the states.

But here in Alexander’s hometown, one that has wrestled greatly with crime, people lashed out at a government they viewed as corrupt and inept while mourning a young man, who like many classmates, saw the teachers college as the only viable way to get ahead. He studied at another university for a short time, with the idea of becoming a lawyer, but settled on teaching.

As many as eight other missing students come from this region of Guerrero State, one of the poorest and most violent in Mexico.

For many boys aspiring to lives away from the fields of squash and jicama, the teachers college in Ayotzinapa, about an hour’s drive from Acapulco, provides one of the more viable alternatives.

Alexander had just started there a few months before he was abducted with other students in a confrontation with the police in Iguala; the students had sought to steal buses for a coming demonstration, a common practice.

Mr. Mora last spoke to his son on Sept. 16, when Alexander came home to celebrate Mexican Independence Day, but they talked on the phone a few times after that, as Alexander requested money for meals.

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In this dusty town of 2,000, neighbors and family members, several weeping, streamed into the small, two-bedroom cinder-block house as Mr. Mora built an altar in the living room with flowers and pictures of Alexander.

Mr. Mora patiently greeted them for hours, but at one point retreated to a back room, where he could be heard sobbing.

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“You have to be strong, for the rest of those poor students,” a woman said as she consoled him. “You can’t give up now; something has to change.”

Mr. Mora said he had nothing but contempt for the country’s leaders and did not know what to believe about the apparent motive for the killings. He noted bitterly that none of the country’s leaders had called him to express condolences.