Mexico’s election is now the bloodiest in its modern history after a candidate running for local office in central Puebla state was murdered on Friday at a political rally, taking the number of assassinated candidates to 37 ahead of today’s vote.
Jorge Huerta Cabrera, a candidate who was running for a council seat in the town of Izucar de Matamoros, was gunned down in the attack, the state prosecutor’s office said.
Huerta Cabrera’s wife and one of his colleagues were wounded in the attack, authorities said.
Photo: AFP
He was a candidate for the Green Party, an ally of the governing Morena party.
“His life was taken from him in an unjust and violent way,” another local candidate, Eliseo “El Chino” Morales, said in a statement posted on social media.
The killing takes the number of assassinated candidates in this year’s election season to 37, one more than during the 2021 midterm election when 36 candidates were killed, data from security consultancy Integralia showed.
Violent crime has emerged as one of the top issues in this year’s presidential contest, in which the ruling party of outgoing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been forced to defend a persistently high murder rate, as the opposition has sought to use the bloodshed to argue for change.
Ruling party hopeful Claudia Sheinbaum is widely expected to win today’s vote and become Mexico’s first female president.
“It’s possible that violence is being used as a means to define the election in advance, particularly when certain interests are perceived to be at risk in the event that a particular political project triumphs,” Integralia researcher Armando Vargas said.
The consultancy has also counted 828 nonlethal attacks on candidates during the current election season, up from 749 on Monday.
Analysts point to Mexico’s mix of powerful drug cartels and often corrupt local governments as contributing to the dangers faced by candidates.
On Wednesday, the last official day of compaigning, dramatic video showed a mayoral candidate in the southern state of Guerrero being shot in the head at point-blank rage with a pistol during a campaign rally.
He was among 560 candidates and election officials who have been given security guards by the government due to persistent threats.
Friday’s grisly assassination was captured on video, with mayhem erupting at the rally after the shots rang out.
Drug cartels have long staged targeted assassinations of mayoral and other local candidates who threaten their control. The gangs depend on controlling local police chiefs, and taking a share of municipal budgets.
In the run-up to the vote, gangs have increasingly taken to spraying whole campaign rallies with gunfire, burning ballots or preventing the setting up of polling stations, and even putting up banners seeking to influence voters.
It is likely that some drug gangs would try to force voters to cast ballots for their favored candidates, security analyst David Saucedo said.
“It is reasonable to assume that the cartels will mobilize their support bases during Sunday’s elections,” Saucedo said. “They have loyal voters who they have won over through the distribution of food packages, cash, medicine and infrastructure projects. They will use them to support narco-candidates.”
In some places, it appears the gangs are encouraging people to vote, while discouraging voting in areas controlled by their rivals.
On Friday, electoral authorities reported that assailants burned a house where ballots were being stored in Chicomuselo, in the southern state of Chiapas. While they did not say who was behind the attack, the town is completely dominated by two warring drug cartels, Jalisco and Sinaloa.
On May 14, gunmen apparently linked to a cartel shot and killed 11 people in a single day in Chicomuselo. On May 17, five people were killed along with a mayoral candidate when shooters opened fire on a crowd in La Concordia in Chiapas, about 75km east of Chicomuselo.
Saucedo said the shootings are a sign that narco gangs are no longer willing to see their handpicked candidates lose.
“Rather than allow the victory of a candidate who is not in line with their criminal interests, or allow a candidate linked to a rival drug gang to win, they use this tactic,” Saucedo said. “What we’re seeing in the final stretch is pretty desperate strategy on the part of some groups of drug traffickers.”
Additional reporting by AP and AFP
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