Mexico’s attorney general says that as far as the government is concerned, the 43 student teachers that disappeared last September in Guerrero state were indeed murdered, even though no bodies have been recovered.  Several police, gang members, and the mayor of the town where they went missing are charged in the killings.

“The evidence allows us to determine that the students were kidnapped, killed, burned and thrown into the river,” said Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam.

The evidence is pretty compelling.  Investigators gathered the confessions from 39 cops and gang members.  They show that the 43 students from a politically-Liberal teacher training school in Ayotzinapa went to Iguala town to protest corruption; the mayor ordered police to seize the students, and the students were seen being bundled into the backs of police vehicles; the cops turned them over to the local drug gang; the gang members murdered the 43, burned the bodies, and dumped the ashes in a river.

Scientists at the University of Innsbruck, Austria matched DNA provided from the family of one victim to remains provided by the Mexican authorities, but the rest of the samples had degraded and could not be matched.  Authorities say other evidence was taken from the scene of the pyre.  Nearly 100 people have been detained in the case.

But this has not been enough for the families, nor for a Mexican public that sees the government more concerned with privatization and big business than with the 100,000 people killed by drug gangs and corrupt cops over the years.  They’re afflicted with the hope that somehow, someday, the 43 will be ‘found’, as well as a growing distrust of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government.  The families held another march in Mexico City this week, to mark four months since the 43 went missing.

“The government can stab anyone in the back, like they did to us.  We want a just and honorable government that wants to protect us, and serve us, not a government that is killing us little by little,” said Berta Martinez, mother of missing Julio Cesar Martinez.