COTIJA, Mexico (AP) — Mexico’s drug cartels and gangs appear to be playing a broader role in Sunday elections which will determine the presidency, nine governors and around 19 thousand city halls and other local positions.
The country’s powerful drug cartels They have been staging selective murders for a long time of mayoral candidates and other local candidates who threaten his control. Gangs in Mexico depend on the control of local police chiefs and participation in municipal budgets; national politics seems to interest them less.
But in the run-up to Sunday’s vote, gangs have increasingly begun spraying entire campaign rallies with gunfire, burning ballot papers or blocking polling stations from being set up – even putting up banners seeking to influence voters. voters.
Security analyst David Saucedo says it’s likely that some drug gangs will try to force voters to vote for their favorite candidates.
“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 won over through the distribution of food packages, money, medicines and infrastructure projects. They will use them to support drug trafficking candidates.”
In some places, it appears that gangs are encouraging people to vote, while discouraging voting in areas controlled by their rivals.
On Friday, election authorities reported that attackers burned a house where ballots were being stored before Sunday in the violence-ravaged city of Chicomuselo in the southern state of Chiapas. Although they did not say who was behind the attack, the city is completely dominated by two warring drug cartels, Jalisco and Sinaloa.
On May 14, armed men 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 Gunmen opened fire on a crowd in the city of La ConcordiaChiapas, about 75 kilometers east of Chicomuselo.
Targeted killings of local candidates continued. On Wednesday, dramatic video footage showed a mayoral candidate in the southern state of Guerrero being shot in the head at close range with a pistol.
And mass attacks on campaign rallies, once extremely rare in Mexico, are becoming common.
Also on Wednesday, the last official day of the campaign, unidentified gunmen opened fire a few blocks from the final campaign rally of a mayoral candidate in the western state of Michoacan, sending hundreds of people scrambling in search of of security.
“It seemed like a normal night, like the end of other candidates’ campaigns,” said Angélica Chávez, a housewife who was at the rally in Cotija. “Then there were shots, several shots very close together. And then people started running and diving to the ground, crouching.”
Chávez was injured in the stampede and had to take refuge in a local church.
In Celaya, a city in Guanajuato, gunmen opened fire at a campaign event in April, killing a candidate for mayor and wounding three of her supporters.
Saucedo, the analyst, sees the shootings as a sign that drug gangs are no longer willing to see their hand-picked candidates lose.
“Instead of allowing a candidate to win who is not in line with their criminal interests, or allowing a candidate linked to a rival drug gang to win, they use this tactic,” Saucedo said. “What we are seeing in the final stretch is a very desperate strategy on the part of some drug trafficking groups.”
Saucedo said that such attempts to control drug trafficking in local politics had previously been seen in some particularly violent states, such as Tamaulipas. “What was once limited… is now spreading to include the entire country,” he said.
The National Electoral Institute says it had to cancel plans for 170 polling locations, mainly in Chiapas and Michoacan and mainly due to security problems. In Chiapas, electoral authorities say there are places they cannot even go.
In the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo, a shadowy group that local media outlets associate with the Northeast’s dominant drug cartel has posted posters alleging that a mayoral candidate is linked to the rival Gulf drug cartel.
Authorities have not confirmed the origin of the crude poster, which includes a photoshopped image of the candidate brandishing an assault rifle and wearing a bulletproof vest with Gulf cartel insignia.
In the state of Morelos, south of Mexico City, residents woke up this week to find a banner hanging on a road claiming that a candidate for governor was linked to rival drug gangs. The track was signed by a local drug dealer whose name is unknown, “the Commander of the Three Letters”.
Another apparently gang-related banner threatened that anyone trying to buy votes would be “severely punished.” This track was signed by “Those who always gave the orders here”.
Such developments seem to indicate that the cartels’ previous calculations – eliminate the strongest candidate they don’t like and the remaining main party candidate will win by default – have become more complicated.
In a town in Michoacán Maravatio, gangs apparently tried to eliminate any doubts about who will win this year and killed three candidates for mayor of the city which were not to his liking.
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Sánchez reported from Mexico City. Associated Press writers Mark Stevenson in Mexico City and Edgar H. Clemente in Tapachula, Mexico, contributed to this report.
