Mexico’s political assassinations focused on increasing violence

It was a sunny afternoon in Ciudad Obregón, a city in northwestern Mexico. Abel Murrieta, a candidate for mayor of the municipality of Cajeme, where the city is located, stood at a busy intersection next to a mall, grabbing leaflets on canvas to vote in the June 6 election.

A man in a gray shirt and jeans climbed up, pulled out a gun and fired 10 bullets at the former state attorney general, including two in the head, before crossing the street again and escaping in a car waiting as Murrieta lay on the pavement. Videos from official security cameras broadcast on television showed scattered leaflets and blood soaking his white shirt.

Murrieta was the 32nd candidate assassinated in the run-up to the election, when Mexicans across the country will elect 500 federal lawmakers, 15 state governors and thousands of mayors and local officials.

Since the election process began last September, 85 politicians have been killed, including 32 who had been candidates for office, according to Etellekt Consultores, which keeps track of campaign violence. This makes them the second bloodiest elections to be recorded, after the 2018 presidential vote.

According to Etellekt, most of the victims were candidates for mayor of parties in opposition to the incumbents of these states. Their deaths have exposed deep-rooted ties between organized crime groups and local officials who protect them.

“If you confront them, they will be harassed or killed,” said Rubén Salazar, director of Etellekt. “This is Mexican democracy at the local level. . . No one can run for office without the permission of the mayor and the local head of crime.

It seems that Murrieta was no exception. In a posthumously published polling place, proclaimed to be “serious about committing crimes… I’m not scared.” Hours later he had been shot dead, the alleged assailant captured in an official street security camera in the state where Lopez Obrador’s former security minister is running for president.

Political assassinations have highlighted the challenges facing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.hugs not bullets”Strategy against organized crime, its new militarized federal police force and its repeated promises to deliver peace in a country where violence has been raging for 15 years almost 100 murders per day.

Violence, which has been spiraling Mexico since former President Felipe Calderón launched a catastrophic war on drugs in 2006, it is the main electoral concern of Mexicans, who dominate many races. A poll was found in this month’s newspaper El Financiero two-thirds of the people disagreed with the management of the López Obrador problem, with only 18% approval.

Since 2006, the number of homicides has tripled. The government says it has now contained the rise, and reported a 4% drop in murders during the first four months of this year compared to the same period last year.

But in April there were 2,857 murders, 4% more than in April 2020, as well as 77 femicides, the murder of women by gender, a jump of 13% over the same month of the year past.

Mexico’s killings hit an all-time high in 2019, with 34,682 homicides and 970 femicides. Last year it was little better: 34,554 homicides and 977 femicides. So far this year, there have been 11,277 homicides and 318 femicides.

Ricardo Márquez Blas, a former security official, said on a dozen occasions since López Obrador’s term began that the number of homicides had exceeded 3,000 a month, including femicides, compared to just three of the ‘previous administration 2012-18.

López Obrador, who took office in 2018, says he has taken a different approach to tackling the root causes of the crime, offering jobs and scholarships to young people instead of facing cartels directly.

But critics say he, like previous governments, has relied on the military instead of reforming a country’s state and local police forces. the officers win about $ 600 a month and a half have to buy their own boots.

In a timely critique of Mexico’s strategy, former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Landau dit López Obrador had adopted a “rather laissez-faire attitude” towards drug cartels despite estimates that they controlled “between 35 and 40 percent of the country.”

“See the cartels. . . like its Vietnam, which has been for some of its predecessors, and so I think. . . he sees it as a distraction from not focusing on his agenda, ”he told an online seminar.

This was reminiscent of the “pax narca” (a tolerance of cartel activities as long as they were contained) that reigned while the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled Mexico for most of the twentieth century.

“The president doesn’t want to take over El Narco,” Salazar said, using the Mexican term for drug cartels.

He said that López Obrador, who is generally considered to be trying to replicate the centralized power of the PRI, “does not understand” that the old coexistence had been shattered as the new parties disrupted the welcoming criminal associations and provoked new ones.

“The president does not want to acknowledge that there is a very big problem of narco politics in the country advancing by leaps and bounds,” Salazar said, while politics and crime are mixed locally.

Analysts say the climate of polarization is further eroded by the president’s daily press conferences, where he rains criticism against his political opponents and electoral authorities, which he says are biased.

“With all this polarization, far from fulfilling its promises of peace, it gives us a more turbulent country,” said Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, an expert on crime and violence at Loyola University in Chicago.

“López Obrador has polarized these elections to the point of practically declaring war on electoral institutions. My big concern is that what we are seeing now doesn’t stop after June 6, ”he said.