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MEXICO CITY — Noé Ramos was chatting with voters, sharing breakfast with supporters of his mayoral reelection bid in his hometown in northern
Mexico.
“It’s something very special that people give me a glass of water, that
they invite me to have a taco, to have a tamale,” Ramos said in a Facebook livestream last month featuring him at an outdoor table in El Mante in Tamaulipas state. “It motivates me to keep on working to make things
better. … I will not defraud them.”

An hour later, Ramos was dead. An attacker approached him on the campaign
trail and stabbed him multiple times.

The same day, April 19, a mayoral candidate in the southern state of
Oaxaca was found dead, two days after he was reported missing.

The slayings of at least 30 candidates have provided a chilling backdrop
to Mexico’s June 2 elections, as criminal gangs seek expanded control in
states where cartels already wreak havoc. The country’s largest vote ever,
with more than 20,000 posts up for grabs and a marquee contest that will
almost certainly see Mexico choose its first female president, has led to
one of the bloodiest election cycles of recent times — and one in which
voters say they are most worried about public safety.

On Wednesday, the last official day of the Mexican campaign, another
mayoral candidate was killed — in the western state of Guerrero, among
Mexico’s most violent. José Alfredo Cabrera, an opposition hopeful in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez, was shot dead at his closing campaign
rally, authorities said. Video circulating online showed a smiling Cabrera greeting supporters as a hand holding a pistol appears at the back of his
head. What sound like repeated shots are heard among screams from the
crowd as the video loses focus. Authorities did not immediately verify the authenticity of the video, but the governor’s office confirmed the
candidate’s slaying.

The killings this cycle, documented by human rights groups and others,
haven’t reached the four dozen killings of candidates before the 2018
election, but the Mexican consultancy Integralia has declared the current campaign season the most violent in modern Mexican history when also
taking into account threats, disappearances, kidnappings and other acts of intimidation — against not only office-seekers, but also current and
former public officials and “collateral” victims such as family members.

Integralia counted 560 victims of political violence as of May 1 —
compared with 389 victims during the 2017-18 campaign and 299 in the 2020-
21 midterms. It specified 316 attacks or threats against candidates as of
an updated report May 28.

The violence this year, as in other recent election cycles, has not
targeted big-name candidates for the presidency, gubernatorial posts or
other high-profile positions. Rather, those seeking municipal offices are
in the crossfire.

“It’s the Tip O’Neill phenomenon: All politics are local,” said David
Shirk, a political scientist at the University of San Diego, referring to
the late congressional leader from Massachusetts. “Mayors and mayoral candidates are essentially under siege because they are a critical point
of influence and protection for criminal actors.”

Gangs seek to finance their own nominees — and then strong-arm or
eliminate opponents. Crooked mayors can deliver corrupt cops and other
benefits to criminals seeking dominion over smuggling routes, extortion targets, municipal budgets and other opportunities in their territories,
or plazas. Local politicians can be more vulnerable to cartel pressure
than governors and other high-ranking lawmakers.

“Organized crime needs some kind of understanding with the authorities,”
said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a Mexican political analyst. “That may be a
kind of negotiation that can be friendly, or skirts legality, or involves bribes and collusion — or it can be violent, with threats, extortion or
direct aggression.”

And buying politicians is far more certain than working through the
democratic process.

“Criminal organizations need guarantees,” said Bravo Regidor. “Uncertainty doesn’t guarantee that the winner will be someone who agrees with the
deals they have made.”

Of course, being on a gang payroll is no assurance of longevity. Rival
factions may come calling in a country where organized crime is highly fragmented.

“The real dilemma that a lot of candidates and officials face is this: If
they are in the pocket of one criminal group, will they draw fire from another?” said Shirk, who heads the Justice in Mexico program at the
University of San Diego.

Another factor, of course, is protection: Hopefuls for local posts seldom
have the bodyguards that accompany higher-level candidates.

The violence has prompted the Mexican military to bolster security,
dispatching more than 3,450 troops tasked with protecting some 554
aspirants, with the largest deployments for presidential and gubernatorial office-seekers, according to the secretary of defense. Still, there is no federal escort for most candidates, who often seek out protection from
state and local police forces, or hire private bodyguards.

“Political violence is out of control and there is no real possibility
that state or federal authorities can protect those who seek help,” wrote columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio in Mexico’s El Financiero newspaper. “And
the form in which these cartels have been empowered, with the help of some politicians … leaves everyone exposed.”

On the morning of April 1, Bertha Gisela Gaytán outlined how, if elected
mayor of her home city of Celaya, she would target ever-mounting violence.
Then she took to the streets of the industrial hub with supporters. It was
the first day of her campaign.

A hit squad lurked. At least one assailant opened fire at point-blank
range, according to police and witness comments to the media. The killers
drove off on a pair of motorcycles. Images of Gaytán’s body lying face
down on the street with blood flowing from her head were soon online.

Gaytán, a 47-year-old lawyer, had sought protection from federal
authorities but had yet to receive it.

“We had hopes that she would make a difference because she said she was
going to combat the narcos,” said María Celorio, 32, a resident of Celaya
— which, like much of the central state of Guanajuato, has become an organized-crime battleground, registering some of the country’s highest homicide rates. “Instead, they killed her.”

Federal security was finally forthcoming for Gaytán — at her funeral,
which featured phalanxes of troops guarding Celaya’s cathedral.

“Today we mark an absurd death, a death provoked by killers who believe
they dominate society,” eulogized Father César Corres Cadavieco. “By
cowardly criminals capable of finishing off a life that is an
inconvenience to their own interests.”

Gaytán was a member of the ruling leftist Morena party of outgoing
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — as were 10 of the candidates slain
so far in the electoral season, the most of any party. But analysts said
that may just reflect Morena’s domination of Mexican politics, not a
targeting of its candidates for ideological motives.

Campaign violence tends to be concentrated in states such as Guanajuato, Guerrero, Tamaulipas and Michoacán, where cartels hold sway across vast
swaths of territory.

In the Michoacán city of Maravatío on Feb. 26, gunmen killed two mayoral candidates — from opposing political parties — seven hours apart. Both
were shot in their vehicles. Authorities blamed organized crime but never clarified if the slayings were connected.

A sharp rise in violence has battered the southern state of Chiapas in
recent months, killing scores and forcing hundreds from their homes.
Mexico’s two major criminal syndicates — the Sinaloa cartel and the
Jalisco New Generation cartel — are at war in a conflict to secure drug-
and migrant-smuggling corridors from neighboring Guatemala, across
jungles, rivers and mountains.

A series of attacks on mayoral candidates and their entourages in Chiapas
this month have left at least 16 dead, including Lucero Esmeralda López
Maza, 28, mayoral hopeful in the municipality of La Concordia, along with
her sister. Three other mayoral aspirants from towns across Chiapas were injured in three other attacks, officials said.

On May 12, a total of 11 people, mostly from one family, were massacred in
the town of Chicomuselo, some 20 miles from the Guatemala border.

The isolated town is not far from one of the campaign’s most puzzling
scenes: During a visit by Claudia Sheinbaum, the presidential front-
runner, men in ski masks approached her vehicle and asked for help in
bringing peace to Chiapas. They soon left, assuring the candidate that
they were not fifis — a derogatory term for wealthy snobs popularized by
López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s political mentor. No one was hurt in the
encounter, but the peculiar incident dramatized the potential
vulnerability of even the best-protected candidates.

“Very strange,” Sheinbaum said afterward.

Chiapas’ Catholic bishops have declared that “there are no conditions for elections to take place” in much of the state. Many terrified office-
seekers across Chiapas have dropped out.

Many candidates and local party officials in Chiapas and Tamaulipas that
The Times reached out to did not respond to requests for comment or said
they did not want to discuss the issue.

On a recent visit to Chiapas, López Obrador denied that the state was “in flames.” Some have blamed the outgoing president’s policies for an
expansion in gang control in parts of the country. But he rejects
allegations that his “hugs not bullets” approach — avoiding clashes with cartels in favor of funding social programs providing alternatives beyond
a life in crime for impoverished youth — has exacerbated violence.

Even when authorities make arrests — which analysts say is all too rare —
law enforcement actions can leave more questions than answers

This month, the chief prosecutor in Guanajuato state said seven suspects
had been arrested in Gaytán’s slaying. But authorities clarified neither
the motive nor who orchestrated the killing.

Prosecutors in the cartel-dominated border area of Tamaulipas — widely considered a “narco state” — announced the arrest of a suspect in the
stabbing death of Ramos, the mayor seeking reelection in El Mante.
Authorities portrayed the suspect as a lone-wolf drug user and former
butcher with a criminal record who believed himself to be “an avenger of
God,” according to official statements and media accounts.

That didn’t explain how the assailant, reportedly requesting a selfie with
the candidate, managed to get close enough to stab Ramos, whose campaign
had hired private bodyguards — in part because of a public history of
threats against Ramos going back to at least 2022.

“I’m scared because we don’t know why this happened,” Ramos’ widow, Sheyla Palacios, told a Tamaulipas TV station about her husband’s assassination.

Palacios has taken Ramos’ spot on the ballot, running for mayor of the
city of 70,000. Now state police are stationed outside Palacios’ home with security officials inside, she has said. She campaigns at choreographed
events, escorted by armed guards.

Voters understand the need for extreme caution, even at the cost of
sacrificing intimacy with constituents, Palacios says. “The people on the streets say they are with me, they hug me,” she said in the TV interview.
“They give me words of encouragement, they pray for me.”

Times special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this
report.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2024-05-29/mexico-election- violence-cartel-killings-candidates

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