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
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
RSS