Vice News

During the last decade of extreme violence associated with Mexico's drug wars, Mexicans have become used to the discovery and exhumation of clandestine graves filled with victims of the horror. This month, the authorities are digging up a shady grave with a difference — the corpses were put there by the government.

Carmelo Ramírez Morales never imagined a life without obstacles when he enrolled in the Ayotzinapa college for rural teachers in Mexico's beleaguered southern state of Guerrero. But he did not expect that two years later he would be seeking political asylum in the United States after surviving a police attack that killed three fellow students and disappeared another 43.

The US pours around $1.3 billion into the Egyptian military each year, financing its massive arsenal of US-made weapons: F-16s, Apache helicopters, M1A1 tanks, and a flood of small arms, missiles, and equipment. But the State Department and the Department of Defense don't have a fully functioning systems to track the flow of weapons.

"Mexico has not had a political or security structure that limits, or breaks down criminal organizations," says Guillermo Valdés, former head of the Mexican intelligence service, who says the state has instead implemented a "schizophrenic policy" that mixes periodic crackdowns with tolerance.