Mexico City, Mexico.
Mexico lives a new violent escalation prior to the June elections, with dozens of politicians killed in six months at the hands of organized crime trying to expand its power.
the pressure from drug traffickers and other gangs it also includes kidnappings, house fires and funding of candidates, according to the government, which denounces the existence of an “organized crime party”.
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According to authorities, they have been murdered since September 66 politicians, Of which two last Thursday: Yuriel González and Melquiades Vázquez, aspiring to mayorships of the states of Chihuahua (north) and Veracruz (this).
The criminals “seek to strengthen their operation by intimidating and increasing their political influence,” Security Minister Rosa Rodriguez denounced when announcing last week a plan to protect candidates in parliamentary and regional elections.
Rodriguez added that in some places criminals “designate” aspirants to control budgets and extort governments and their suppliers.
In this context Ignacio Sánchez was assassinated on February 24, a pro-government candidate for mayor of Puerto Morelos, a neighbor of the tourist Cancún (east).
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“He was a prized guy, he walked alone, not like those linked to organized crime who go with bodyguards. It was a political crime. It was clear he would win,” a relative told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Sanchez, 42, had told people around him that an opponent “offered five million pesos (about $ 239,000) to whoever killed him,” the source added.
Mayor “ninot”
A dozen drug trafficking organizations and other gangs engaged in fuel theft, drug sales at retail, and migrant trafficking, among other crimes, operate in Mexico.
The Jalisco Nueva Generación Poster, the Sinaloa Poster and a new side of the Juárez Poster “are trying to sponsor candidates,” says Anabel Hernández, author of the book “The Lords of the Narcotics”.
“If the mayor of a town comes (wins) by (interference from) organized crime or by white-collar crime, he will be a puppet,” 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 assaults on politicians, of whom 152 were assassinated (including 48 candidates), according to a study by the consulting firm Etellekt.
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Political violence “remains entrenched at the local level,” the firm added, noting that no one has been arrested for the killings committed in the current fight.
Behind the leaving blood there is the pretense of organized crime to “place mayors who guarantee impunity for operation at the local level,” says Gerardo Rodriguez, security expert at the Autonomous University of Puebla
But there are also “political chiefs” who “use violence because they see their power threatened,” Rodriguez said.
dangerous alternation
In the same vein, Rubén Salazar, director of Etellekt, observes that the phenomenon “has been growing as the processes of alternation have advanced” in Mexico, especially since the year 2000 when the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) went losing the presidency after ruling for seven decades.
For Salazar, this year “a system of vertical control exercised by the president” was thwarted to the local level. So “when mayors start to have power to nominate their candidates, murders start to grow,” Salazar explains.
Etellekt notes that most of the politicians killed in the current election period “belonged to parties opposed to state governments.”
The Association of Local Authorities of Mexico documented for its part 192 murders of mayors, former mayors and local politicians between 2006 and July 2020.