Mexico City, Mexico.
Mexico It is experiencing another violent escalation ahead of the June elections, in which dozens of politicians have been murdered in six months by organized crime trying to expand its power.
The pressure from drug traffickers and other gangs It also includes kidnappings, house burning and candidate funding, the government said, denouncing the existence of an “organized crime party”.
Authorities say they have been murdered since September 66 politicians, including two last Thursday: Yuriel González and Melquiades Vázquez, aspiring mayors of the states of Chihuahua (north) and Veracruz (east).
The criminals “are trying to strengthen their force through intimidation and increase their political influence,” denounced Security Minister Rosa Rodríguez, who last week announced a plan to protect candidates for parliamentary and regional elections.
Rodríguez added that in some places criminals “appoint” applicants to control budgets and extort money from governments and their suppliers.
In this context, Ignacio Sánchez, a pro-government candidate for mayor of Puerto Morelos, a neighbor of the tourist resort of Cancun (east), was murdered on February 24.
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“He was a respected man, he walked alone, not like those dealing with organized crime and walking around with bodyguards. It was a political crime. It was clear he would win,” a close friend told AFP anonymously. . .
Sánchez, 42, had told those around him that an opponent offered “five million pesos (about $ 239,000) to whoever killed him,” the source added.
Mayor “Romper”
In Mexico, there are a dozen drug trafficking organizations and other gangs involved in fuel theft, drug retailing and migrant smuggling, among other crimes.
The Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel, the Sinaloa cartel and a new side of the Juárez cartel “are trying to sponsor candidates,” said Anabel Hernández, author of the book “Los señorres del narco”.
“If a town branch president arrives (wins) because of (interference by) organized crime or white collar crime, he will be a wimp,” warned President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The 2018 election campaign, in which the left-wing president was elected, was the bloodiest since the revolution (1910-1924) with some 700 attacks on politicians, 152 of which were murdered (including 48 candidates), according to a study by the consultancy. Etellekt.
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Political violence “remains entrenched at the local level,” the firm added, emphasizing that no one has been arrested for the murders committed during the current war.
Behind the trace of blood Organized crime is said to “place mayors guaranteeing impunity for operations at the local level,” said Gerardo Rodríguez, a security expert at the Autonomous University of Puebla.
But there are also “political caciques” who “use violence because their power is threatened,” says Rodríguez.
Dangerous variety
In the same vein, Rubén Salazar, Etellekt’s director, notes that the phenomenon “grows as the exchange processes progressed” in Mexico, especially since 2000, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost its presidency after seven decades of reign.
For Salazar that year “a vertical control system exercised by the president” fell at the local level. So “when mayors begin to gain the power to nominate their candidates, killings start to increase,” Salazar explains.
Etellekt points out that the majority of politicians murdered in the current election period “belonged to parties opposed to state governments.”
The Association of Local Authorities of Mexico documented 192 murders of mayors, former mayors and local politicians between 2006 and July 2020.