Site of Mexico mass grave is 'land of the wicked'

A resident of the rugged streets and hills of a southern Mexican hamlet where a mass grave was found this weekend describes the area as the "land of the wicked."
Up a steep hill covered in thick vegetation and far from public view, investigators pulled at least 21 bodies out of pits so far Sunday amid fears they could contain 43 students from a teacher training college who disappeared last week.
The humble community below is known as Pueblo Viejo, a district of the city of Iguala where the aspiring teachers were last seen before local police, allied with a gang, shot at their buses on September 26, authorities say.
Resident Jose Garcia said the sport-utility vehicles favored by the gang would often roar across the narrow streets at night in Pueblo Viejo, a typically poor village of violence-wracked Guerrero state.
Garcia, a rare person willing to talk about gang activity in his neighborhood, said the criminals are known to hide in hillside caves.
Sometimes, bonfires could be seen flaring up in the distance.
"This is the land of the wicked," Garcia told AFP.
Prosecutors say the Guerreros Unidos gang was involved with municipal police in a series of shootings in Iguala on the night of September 26 that left six people dead and 25 wounded before the students disappeared.
Authorities have detained 30 people, including at least 22 officers. A witness told AFP several students were bundled into police cars after police shot at buses the youngsters had commandeered to return home.
The municipal police never ventured into Pueblo Viejo until recently, Garcia said.
This past week, he said, "they were going up there back and forth," Garcia said, pointing to a spot between two mountains where the mass grave was found.
- Students from radical school -
The mass grave was found on Saturday and some of the remains were burned, officials said.
Authorities are conducting DNA analysis to check whether the bodies match the missing students.
Officials who visited the grave site said it takes an hour to reach it from Pueblo Viejo, up a narrow mud path surrounded by dense tropical vegetation.
Some 20 forensic experts arrived at a local morgue to help conduct autopsies and identify the victims.
An official from the state prosecutor's office who was at the crime scene said a bag was found containing black clothes and objects that appear to have belonged to the students.
The grave site was found through the interrogations of suspects, officials said.
Another investigator told AFP that the suspects gave information about houses near Pueblo Viejo where the students had been sequestered.
"We found one of these homes three days ago," the investigator said on condition of anonymity.
The motive behind last week's attack on the students remains unclear.
The students, from a teacher training college near the state capital Chilpancingo known as a hotbed of protests, say they went to Iguala to raise funds for their studies.
Ayotzinapa school students are known to hijack buses to move around the state, and that's what they did again on September 26 to return home from Iguala.
Except this time, officers shot at the buses. Authorities suspect the mayor had a role in the violence, but he has gone into hiding since prosecutors sought to question him.