After a long battle with his political opponents, Benjamín López began his term as mayor of Xoxocotla on January 1. The last six months had been a horror, a nonsense. The neighbors had gone to the polls twice and then had met in an assembly, through the courts, to decide which of the two elections counted. “In the end we voted on the platoon,” remembers Manuel Alejandro Jiménez, the municipal secretary. “We painted a line on the ground. Those who preferred the June 6 election stayed on one side and those who wanted the October 3 election on the other. In the end, we won," he adds.
López could hardly enjoy the victory.
Days after being sworn in, on Tuesday, January 11, gunmen gunned him down in his house.
The gunmen arrived at lunchtime at the address, in one of the commercial streets of the town.
His assistant and his driver tried to dissuade them, to convince them that the mayor was somewhere else, but to no avail.
When they found him they shot and López died there shortly after.
“What kind of security should he have had?” Reflects Secretary Jiménez, 33, “a military man?
There was someone with him,” he says, referring to the driver, “but more so in case a fight broke out or something.
He was not armed”.
Wrapped in a fog of doubts and suspicions, his murder culminates three strange years in the region, the State of Morelos, near the capital, where homicides have increased and the succession of unusual and violent attacks have made the atmosphere rarer, something which has contributed a series of episodes as extravagant as they are worrying.
"The tension is brutal in the state," a federal government official with extensive knowledge of regional politics tells EL PAÍS.
The house of Benjamin Lopez.
Here he was murdered on January 11.
Nayeli Cruz
There is no better example of local chaos than the figure of the governor, former soccer player Cuauhtémoc Blanco. A week ago, local media released a photograph of Blanco with three theoretically antagonistic criminal leaders, the four of them embracing and smiling. Blanco explained that in reality he did not know them at all. “People ask me for photos all the time,” he said. Far from settling the matter, the governor's explanations blew up an already precarious balance between state powers. Everyone against everyone now prevails: Blanco against the local prosecutor, Uriel Carmona, the prosecutor against Blanco, the governor against opposition deputies and these against him, all accusing each other of links with organized crime.
Blanco's arguments also began an exchange of messages written on huge posters, known in Mexico as narcomantas, hung in different municipalities of the state, including the center of Cuernavaca, the capital. The former attacked the governor, veiledly pointing out his responsibility in the murder of activist Samir Flores, one of the first scandals of his government. A long-standing social fighter, Flores opposed the construction of a thermoelectric plant in Morelos, supported by the federal government and also by Blanco. Sicarios killed him in February 2019.
The second batch of narcomantas was similar, only that the messages defended the governor, pointing to a senator from Morelos, Ángel García, for the case of Samir Flores.
But the third was different.
They appeared after the assassination of Benjamín López in Xoxocotla and the texts were written with strange correction.
The message read: "There goes the first Cuauhtémoc Blanco, don't send me to talk to assholes, keep sucking and you'll be left without mayors."
In addition, he mentioned the president's meeting with drug traffickers, known after the disclosure of the photograph.
Somehow, the message linked the meeting to the mayor's murder.
The motives
A 46-year-old agricultural engineer, Benjamín López had big plans for Xoxocotla, a town of 45,000 inhabitants in the south of Morelos, an hour and a half from Mexico City. The mayor wanted to fix the water problem once and for all. Rescue the supply system and integrate it into the new administration. It was a lacerating issue for the residents, who suffer constant stoppages in the supply, controlled by an opaque civil association increasingly indebted. “We are going to have to make decisions,” said the mayor-elect on December 17.
Jiménez explains that the problem with water is without a doubt the most serious of all that the town faces. A common scheme in the region, the managing association has been in charge of supply for decades. Its management changes every three years, when the neighbors elect new people in charge by vote. Of semi-public logic, the association is opaque in its accounts. And now the problem, Jiménez explains, is that he owes eight million pesos, about $400,000, most of it to the Federal Electricity Company. In the event of non-payment, the company leaves them without electricity, which prevents the operation of the pumps and, therefore, the supply. The suspicion of the municipal team is that the association has been keeping the fees from the neighbors and selling the little water that arrives without the pumps.
Seen this way, the question of water appears as a possible reason for the attack.
In Morelos, conflicts over supply are common and suspicions of corruption and criminal infiltration in the managing entities are constant.
But it could also be the electoral battle that Xoxocotla has experienced since June, with its political rivalries, which were about to provoke episodes of violence, especially on the day of the platoon vote.
“Assemblies are very dangerous,” says Jiménez, “because that day you see what everyone votes for.”
A motorcycle taxi on the main road of the municipality.
Since 2017, Xoxocotla is independent and no longer depends on Puente de Ixtla.
Nayeli Cruz
Although it seems that the electoral matter was settled in December, the conflict lasted for months and the positions seemed at times irreconcilable. There was a lot of uncertainty in the town. And besides, everything was new. Xoxocotla depended on the neighboring municipality until 2017, the year it became independent. The secession had a transitional government that after the first elections of the last cycle, in June, avoided accepting the victory of Benjamín López's team, then led by his brother Juan.
The natural death of Juan López a few days after the elections complicated things even more. His second, Martín Flores, wanted to impose new rules and appointments on the team and caused a split. Benjamín López, Manuel Alejandro Jiménez and others left. Faced with the conflict, new elections were called for October 3, a call that Flores rejected, since he considered that at the death of Juan López, he was the legitimate mayor. Flores' judicial appeals were successful, and one day before the new elections, the Morelos electoral tribunal declared the validity of the first ones. Despite the court's decision, the neighbors went out to vote, giving the victory to Benjamín López. The town could burn at any moment.
The double electoral call forced the court to seek a solution.
In the end, he decided that the people would meet in an assembly to decide which elections were valid, those in June or those in October.
The meeting took place at the end of October, the famous platoon assembly.
The decision of the neighbors was that the valid vote was the last one, which gave Benjamín López the mayorship.
low odds
“The day he was killed, I needed the engineer to sign some documents for me to deliver to the Electoral Board,” Secretary Jiménez recalls. “We were at the Las Cabañas hotel,” he says, referring to his offices, an old motel on the way out of Xoxocotla that they planned to turn into the Municipal Presidency. "There his assistant called me and told me what had happened." Jiménez and the others went to the mayor's house, but when they arrived he was already dead.
His murder provoked the classic reactions of condemnation and the usual promises of punishment to the murderers. Governor Cuauhtémoc Blanco promised to go "to the last consequences to bring those responsible to justice." However, the opposite is likely to happen. According to data from the organization Impunidad Cero, which studies law enforcement in the country, the probability that a murder will go unpunished in Mexico is greater than 89%.
In an interview with EL PAÍS, the local prosecutor, Uriel Carmona, points out that “the material authority was not spontaneous.
It was ordered by someone else.”
Carmona adds that “this makes the hypothesis that it was an issue that had to do with politics more solid.
We have an important advance that will lead us to the arrest of the material executors and eventually the intellectuals.
We have a good idea of who the material authors were”, he ditches.
Facade of the old Las Cabañas hotel, where López wanted to install the municipal offices of Xoxocotla.
Nayeli Cruz
Sources close to the investigation consulted by EL PAÍS indicate that the same or other attackers tried to attack Mayor López at his home on the Friday before his murder. Luckily, that day he was not at home. Since then, the leader hardly set foot in his home to look for clothes or documents. On Tuesday, January 11, he came to rest before some town meetings. He felt cold.
Between the Friday and Tuesday of his murder, López and his team notified the local prosecutor's office and the government secretary of what had happened. In fact, López and the governor coincided on the Monday before the murder at an event in Jojutla, near Xoxocotla. The governor delivered fertilizers to peasants in the region. Secretary Jiménez does not know if López told Blanco about the attempted attack. In any case, the null protection that the mayor enjoyed the day he was killed speaks of the laziness of the state authorities.
Secretary Jiménez and his colleagues find foreign theories of the attack strange. They can't think how a meeting between the governor and criminals could have affected them, leaders of a newborn town dedicated to corn and sorghum. “We didn't think that Xoxo was a plaza,” says Jiménez, “the whole thing about the message is strange. They had warned us that they would still come to ask," he says in reference to criminal groups, "but not even that had happened here."
The closeness of crime with the political class flies over the attack against Mayor López, a reflection in reality of the country, entangled in the battles of a network of mafias that see in the budgets of the towns an alternative to drug traffickers. Prosecutor Carmona points out that "there is an infiltration of people related to organized crime in municipalities, even on the payroll of municipalities, especially in the south of Morelos," he explains, referring to the towns closest to Guerrero, case of Puente de Ixtla, Amacuzac, Tlalquitenango or Jojutla, all very close to Xoxocotla.
"This situation is not within anything that would have been raised here," Jiménez murmurs, "if it seems strange to you, imagine us."
The lack of certainty makes everything more complicated.
Jiménez and the rest of the dead mayor's team believe that anything can happen now.
Since the attack, they have even avoided going to the property they planned to turn into the Presidente, the old motel on the way out of Xoxocotla.
“If we have an attack, here they get lost right away,” says Jiménez, looking at the main road.
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