MEXICO CITY - Sixteen police officers have been arrested and accused of providing cover to drug-cartel gangsters suspected in the grisly slaying of more than 120 people whose bodies are being pulled from mass graves in northeastern Mexico.
The federal Attorney General's Office identified the 16 as members of the municipal police force in the town of San Fernando, near where the bodies were found.
On Thursday, officials in the border state of Tamaulipas said the number of dead who have been extracted from several pits about 90 miles south of Brownsville, Texas, had risen to 126. Digging continued in search of additional victims, the officials said.
Previously, federal authorities had arrested 17 other suspects in the slayings. Attorney General Marisela Morales identified them as hit men from the notorious Zetas drug cartel. She announced a reward equivalent to $2.5 million for information leading to the capture of four additional suspected Zetas gunmen.
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The discovery of the Tamaulipas graves over the last week has horrified Mexicans already reeling from years of drug-war bloodshed. Many of these latest victims are thought to be Mexicans who were pulled from buses that traverse the busy roadways to the United States.
San Fernando was also the site last summer of a massacre of 72 mostly Central American migrants believed slain by the Zetas.
"San Fernando has become the reference point for a region without any law, other than that of organized crime and impunity," Joaquin Lopez-Doriga, Mexico's leading television news anchor, wrote in a scathing column Thursday. "The commission of crimes and criminals of incomprehensible magnitude can only happen in the atmosphere of a failed state" such as Tamaulipas.
Early Thursday, a refrigerated truck with a federal police escort transported between 70 and 76 of the bodies to Mexico City, where forensics specialists will attempt to identify them. There were conflicting reports on the exact number transported.
At least one of the detained Zetas suspects reportedly confessed to kidnapping bus passengers in late March and killing and burying 43 of them.
Thousands of people have gone missing in Mexico in the nearly 4 1/2 years since the drug war intensified. Increasingly their bodies are turning up in clandestine graves. In some cases they are snatched for forced labor for the drug gangs; sometimes they are held to extract ransom from relatives. Some are just robbed and killed.
Amnesty International, in a statement Thursday, called on the Mexican government to expose and investigate the "collusion" between drug gangs and public officials, including police.
The "discovery of mass graves has served to highlight the Mexican government's wider failure to deal with the country's public-security crisis and to reduce criminal violence, which has left many populations vulnerable to attacks, abductions and killings," Amnesty said.
