Elections in Mexico: wave of murders puts democracy itself in the crosshairs

Jesús Corona Damián, a candidate for mayor in Cuautla, Mexico, was in a car near his home one night last month when two men on motorcycles drove by at high speed and shot.

The day before, a local gang had sent a threat to the candidate, so that night he drove behind inches of bulletproof glass. He survived and, in comments to reporters after the attack, issued a defiant note: “No more living in fear, I will not give up.”

Few of the aspiring politicians targeted by Mexico's cartels in the run-up to the biggest elections in the country's history had the opportunity for such resistance.

Political candidates across the country are being assassinated with surprising frequency as powerful groups seek to pave the way for their preferred choices.

Two days before the Cuautla attack, the candidate for mayor of Acatzingo, a neighboring state, was shot and killed in the parking lot of his car dealership. The previous week, the candidate in Pihuamo, running for re-election after a three-year term, was killed at an intersection near the small town's central square.

So far this year, at least 28 candidates have been attacked, with 16 killed, according to data collected through April 1 by the research group Data Cívica, a number that is expected to surpass even the bloodiest election cycles in Mexico's past.

“This is a crucial moment for organized crime to influence who will be in power, who will provide protection, information, resources,” said Sandra Ley, director of Mexico's security program Evalúa, a public policy think tank.

More than 20 thousand positions up for grabs

An estimated 70,000 candidates have come forward to participate in the June 2 elections, where Mexicans will vote to fill more than 20,000 positions, including the national presidency and the governments of nine states.

Most of the violence is concentrated in local elections, where voters will choose a municipal leader, a role similar to that of a mayor with broad control over their communities, managing the distribution of tax revenues and access to natural resources, and many sometimes commanding local police forces.

In municipalities isolated from cartel hotspots, where gangs control drug trafficking routes and infiltrate cash crop production, the positions have become the main entry point for corrupt influence, experts say.

Candidates from across the political spectrum were killed, but most were from the Morena party, founded by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

As attacks on political candidates have increased, Mexican leaders have promised swift prosecutions and launched an effort to protect threatened candidates with armed escorts. But analysts and party leaders warn that the violence has already cooled some campaigns; Dozens of candidates in several states withdrew from their races fearing for their lives.

“The democratic exercise is at risk,” said Guillermo Valencia, leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in Michoacán, one of Mexico’s most dangerous states.

Earlier this year, after two candidates for mayor of the city of Maravatío, Michoacán, were killed within hours, 10 PRI candidates in local races across the state resigned, Valencia said, citing threats they received from the cartels.

The center-right party, part of the national opposition coalition, is now on a “forced march” trying to enlist candidates in the state, he said. Some races where a willing candidate could not be found have been abandoned altogether.

“I try to offer them some security, but it’s practically useless. We are in a state of defense,” said Valencia. “Criminal groups are getting away with it.”

“Blind spot” in the candidate protection program

Lucy Meza and her team have been inundated with threatening messages and phone calls since she announced her candidacy for governor of the state of Morelos last year. “Abandon your candidacy because, if not, we will kill you, we will come after you, we will hunt you down,” she recalled about the threats in an interview with CNN last week.

Meza, a former senator running with an opposition party, sharply criticized the state's governor, former soccer star Cuauhtémoc Blanco, accusing him of corruption and links to organized crime – charges he denied.

She proposed more than quadrupling the number of police officers in the state and investing in technologies such as facial recognition, which will help authorities monitor criminal groups known for extorting millions of pesos from local businesses and farmers.

As the threats continued, Meza this year requested protection under a federal security program for political candidates. She now travels with a group of military bodyguards as she campaigns across the state.

“I’m afraid something could happen to me or my family,” she said.

Under the security program, candidates can request protection from the country's electoral authority and, after analysis, are assigned various levels of security based on the threats they face.

At the beginning of April, 86 candidates had been approved for security protection by the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection, according to the ministry's figures.

The program has shown promise: During the 2021 Mexican elections, when it was introduced, the number of attacks on candidates decreased, said Manuel Perez, a researcher at the Seminar on Violence and Peace at the College of Mexico.

Still, Perez called the program's requirement that applicants demonstrate they were threatened before receiving protection a “blind spot.”

Politicians and analysts have also expressed concern that requests take a long time to be approved and can be complicated by a lack of coordination between the federal and state bureaucracies responsible for providing support.

Last week, Bertha Gisela Gaytán, a candidate for mayor in Celaya, a city in the central state of Guanajuato embroiled in a violent gang turf war, told reporters at a campaign event that she had requested protection through the federal program but was waiting for a return. Later that day, she was shot to death.

The country's security minister, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, confirmed that the federal electoral authority received Gaytán's request for protection in March and forwarded it to a local authority. Authorities are investigating why Gaytán was still without protection on April 1, Icela said.

A threat to democracy itself

Throughout the campaign, López Obrador largely downplayed the broader significance of the attacks, arguing that his administration had reduced homicide rates.

Asked in an interview whether he considered the rise in electoral violence a threat to Mexican democracy, López Obrador hesitated, saying: “Generally, everyone participates. There are many candidates from all parties.”

But in some of the country's most rural areas, where organized criminal groups are most powerful, candidates favored by the cartels have won elections unopposed. In Jilotlán, a city of 10,000 people in the shadow of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, the last election cycle was essentially canceled.

After receiving threats from local gangs, two of the three candidates for mayor in 2021 withdrew from the race. The remaining candidate's uncontested victory was later overturned by a federal election court.

“The election in Jilotlán de los Dolores, Jalisco, does not meet the conditions of a free and authentic election because the insecurity generated by organized crime in that municipality had a double effect: generating non-competitive elections and limiting citizen voting.” said the court, upholding an earlier ruling.

An interim council now runs the city, although with few of the powers of a regular government. According to Marcos Francisco del Rosario Rodríguez, director of the department of sociopolitical and legal studies at the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, criminal groups filled the gap in Jilotlán, providing jobs and services to the community.

“It is misgovernment. The City Council’s hands are tied,” she said.

Elections are scheduled for this year in Jilotlán, but the return of an official government is not guaranteed. In February, a coalition of three main opposition parties said it would present a candidate in each municipality, with the exception of Jilotlán.

“There is a well-founded fear that this precedent will materialize again, and not just in Jilotlán,” del Rosario said. “There are indications that the Jilotlán case will be replicated in other municipalities due to the growing presence of organized crime.”