THOUSANDS of people marked the first anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students by marching down Mexico City’s premier avenue in an atmosphere of defiant hope at the weekend.

To date only two of the students’ remains have been identified by DNA analysis of charred bone fragments.

At a meeting with the parents of the 43 missing students last week, President Enrique Pena Nieto promised to create a special prosecutors’ office to investigate all of Mexico’s disappearances.

According to Mexico’s former attorney general, local police illegally detained the students and then turned them over to the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos, which he said killed them and incinerated their remains.

But a group of experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took that version apart earlier this month, insisting that a pyre to dispose of the bodies was unfeasible in the small area of a rubbish dump where prosecutors claim it was.