It's a terrifying story. The 43 were students at Ayotzinapa teacher’s college, which is known for its political activism and work with marginalized communities. They were on their way to a demonstration when it appears they were ambushed by police and then turned over to a narco gang. Six were killed in the initial attack, one of whom was later found with his eyes gouged out and the skin of his face peeled off.

From Democracy Now!:

Protesters in the Mexican state of Guerrero have set fire to the local legislature as outrage spreads over the disappearance of 43 students. The students from Ayotzinapa teacher’s college have been missing for nearly seven weeks after they were ambushed by police. Unrest has intensified since Mexican Attorney General JesĂșs Murillo Karam announced Friday that suspects in the case have admitted to killing the students and incinerating their bodies at a trash dump. More than 70 people have been arrested in the case, including the mayor of Iguala, who is accused of ordering the police attack. Across Mexico, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in peaceful protests, while groups of demonstrators have laid siege to government buildings, burned cars and blocked highways. The parents of the missing students, meanwhile, have announced they will be traveling across parts of Mexico in three caravans to demand their loved ones’ return. We are joined from Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state, by John Gibler, an author and independent journalist. “I don’t think it’s possible anymore to talk about corruption,” Gibler says. “What we have is two sectors of an industry that have fully merged — the police and the organized crime gangs themselves.”

The story is horrible enough in its own right, but it's further evidence of a phenomenon that drug-war observers—and the rising tide of drug-war films like Heli and El Sicario—have been trying to hammer home for years: The narco "cartels" and the government are fully integrated and coordinate to squelch activism or social change of any kind that would upset the profits they make together by holding the citizenry hostage.

From part two of The Stranger's cocaine series back in 2010:

[University of Washington geographer Dominic] Corva and other drug-trade experts hesitate to call the narco-capitalist organizations "cartels" because the word implies alien entities separate from the state (the way that, say, the Bloods or the Crips are separate from the state). Mexico's narcos are thoroughly integrated into the government—through both contemporary corruption and long-standing historical alliances that predate U.S. drug-prohibition policy.

Major Mexican landowners had been growing marijuana and opium poppies and selling them to the U.S. long before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 (the first major federal drug prohibition—prior to that, even the Sears, Roebuck catalogue advertised a syringe and a dose of cocaine for $1.50). Those Mexican landowners were aligned with, or outright members of, the Mexican political establishment. One brief example: Colonel Esteban CantĂș JimĂ©nez, who had a personal army of 1,800 soldiers and political control of Baja California Norte, started taking a cut from Mexican opium traders as soon as the Harrison Act was passed. The Mexican army eventually flushed him out in 1920—with a force of 6,000—but Colonel JimĂ©nez secured amnesty with the help of a former military colleague.

The overlap between Mexico's military officers, politicians, and drug barons goes all the way back to the beginning.