Nine deaths, two assassination attempts, and candidate’s HQ ambushed by barrage of 50 bullets: Political violence reaches boiling point in Mexico ahead of elections

Two mayoral candidates were nearly killed this week in separate attacks in Chiapas, Mexico, as violence continues to spiral out of control ahead of June elections.

A total of nine people were shot dead this weekend in the failed assassination plots, which also saw the headquarters of one candidate shot up.

Nicolás Noriega, who is seeking the mayor’s seat in Mapastepec, was traveling in a pickup truck early Sunday when gunmen opened fire, killing five campaign workers and wounding two others.

Images on social media showed one of the fatalities lying on the truck bed and two others on a chair and on the road surface.

“I deeply mourn the deaths of my friends, whose lives were cowardly taken,” Noriega wrote on Facebook on Sunday.

“Evil will never rule in our hearts because there are more people among us who love life and think about doing good,” added the candidate under the country’s ruling party, Morena. “I ask all of society to unite to honor life.”

Nicolás Noriega, who is running for mayor in Mapastepec, a city in the southern state of Chiapas, was not injured on Sunday in an attack that killed five campaign workers and wounded two when gunmen opened fire on his convoy

Villa Corzo mayoral hopeful Robertony Orozco was shot twice in the legs on Saturday when assailants ambushed one of his campaign vehicles. Four staffers were killed and another person was injured

Lucero López became the thirtieth political candidate to be assassinated since September 2023, when Mexico’s current electoral process began

Robertony Orozco, who is running for mayor of Villa Corzo under the Morena party, was in a convoy of vehicles on Saturday evening when he and his team were ambushed on a road connecting Villa Corzo to the municipality of San Pedro Buenavista.

The attackers wounded Orozco in both legs, as well as another person, and killed four others.

In the early hours of Sunday, the campaign headquarters of Marco Cuate, who is running for mayor of the central city of Axiochiapan, was shot at more than 50 times.

“We will not allow this act of violence to attempt to intimidate the civic project in the current election battle for the mayor of Axochiapan,” Cuate said in a statement.

La Concordia candidate Lucero López, who is running for the city’s mayoral seat through the Chiapeneco Popular Party, and five people, including a minor, were executed at a campaign event on Thursday.

More than 50 shots were fired early Sunday at the campaign headquarters of Marco Cuate, who is running for mayor of the city of Axiochiapan in central Mexico.

Marco Cuate, who is running for mayor of the central city of Axiochiapan, vowed not to drop out of the race ahead of Mexico’s June 2 elections after his headquarters were shot on Sunday.

An ambulance rushes to one of two wounded victims shot in an attack targeting Robertony Orozco, who is running for mayor of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Orozco was shot twice in the legs and survived

On Wednesday, authorities discovered the severed heads of Efraín Zúñiga, a candidate for municipal council in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, and his wife Rubí Bravo.

López is the 30th aspiring candidate to be murdered since September 2023, according to Data Civica.

At least 100 people seeking positions in local and federal government have halted their campaigns or opted to run for office at all.

In March, at least 46 candidates in the states of Michoacan and Morelos gave up their political aspirations after receiving threats from criminal organizations.

Edgardo Buscaglia, a senior scholar of law and economics at Columbia University and an adviser to agencies at the United Nations, told DailyMail.com that cartels have taken advantage by financing the campaigns of candidates who turn a blind eye.

“Honest people, people who want to participate in politics, cannot present themselves out of fear, out of fear of being killed,” Buscaglia said.

‘Many of those positions of murdered people or people who do not want to be on the list due to threats are later taken by members of criminal networks who infiltrate the lists with their candidacies, candidacies that I describe in my ‘mafiocratic’ books.’

He warned that this is being made possible because the Mexican government does not have the “institutional controls that function to prevent dirty money from purchasing candidates or auditing candidates’ assets” that exist in the United States and countries in the European Union. Union.

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