In a city where murderers tortured and killed with seeming impunity, Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa was ‘the key operator’—and allegedly sealed the fate of 43 student teachers.
Tuesday saw Mexican security forces digging near a garbage dump, excavating yet another unmarked grave with the hope of finally finding 43 student teachers who went missing after a protest last month amid reports of a massacre carried out by the local police.
And the hunt was continuing for the most wanted woman in Mexico, the woman said to have given the Iguala police chief a fateful order when she mistakenly imagined the students might disrupt a party she was throwing in honor of herself.
“Teach them a lesson.”
The order purportedly came from Maria de los Angeles Pineda Villa, wife of the mayor of Iguala and by numerous accounts the person really in charge.
“The key operator,” Sidronio Casarrubias Salgado of the Guerreros Unidos gang recently said of her status in the town’s underworld.
The purpose of the party was to celebrate Pineda’s many good works as the head of the town’s social-welfare agency and to kick off her campaign to succeed her husband, Mayor José Luis Abarca Velazquez.
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