The elections in Mexico enlarge the cemetery of candidates

Elections in Mexico are always preceded by dozens of murders.

Killing is the way to define the electoral poster: if a candidate is revealed as a possible winner, the opponent will give him two shots and the matter will be settled.

Sometimes they are murdered before even running for a party.

On March 1, the presidential, legislative and position renewal campaign begins in thousands of City Councils, which will bring a total of 20,375 candidates to the polls on June 2.

The organizations that track this statistic already count a dozen people murdered for their electoral ties and the campaign has not started.

When this article is read, the figure will have risen; there is not a day that the newspapers do not report on new victims of a still imperfect democracy.

In the last elections, in June 2021, the consulting firm Etellekt kept track: at least 35 candidates were murdered, and no big changes are expected this time.

Those who kill, or rather, have people killed, are politicians or criminals, two figures that are sometimes one.

They want to place local people at the local level who will facilitate not only control and access to the public budget, but also organized crime in those areas, which is why these crimes occur above all in more or less remote municipalities, but not always.

Without reaching an assassination like that of Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994, even without clarifying who ordered the trigger to be pulled, there are many who fall in small cities and jump to the media.

Relatives of Juan Pérez Guardado carry his coffin, in Fresnillo (Zacatecas), on February 8. Adolfo Vladimir (Cuartoscuro)

Last week, two crimes were especially notable, since the victims belonged to the same family and fell in the same town, Fresnillo, one of the most violent in the country, in the also terrible State of Zacatecas.

Juan Pérez Guardado was the brother-in-law of Senator Ricardo Monreal, one of the best-known political figures in Mexico.

It was February 7th.

Four days later, bullets killed Jorge Antonio Monreal, nephew of the senator and governor of Zacatecas, David Monreal.

Politicians know what they are exposing themselves to when they run for elections in Mexico or simply when they work in the public administration, especially in some of the hottest areas.

The three presidential candidates have a good escort organized by the military, the national guard and other agents.

However, the fight is fiercer at the local level, where organized crime operates like a cat on its belly.

The number of attacks of all kinds, with the intention of killing or intimidating, does reach hundreds, 782 in 2021: they violate homes, kidnap, torture, threaten or shoot.

Woe to the one who finds a tree or a stone crossed in the road and gets out of the car.

That is just one method, there are several, in plain sight or in the dark.

Mexico advances in its democratic conquest, which translates into almost free elections with diverse results.

The time of the single party is long gone, when no one in the world asked who would win the elections in the country, because the answer was always the same, the PRI.

Paradoxically, that circumstance, which was described as the perfect dictatorship, greased the system so that no one moved from the line and the crimes were fewer.

With the advance of democracy, the scheme broke down and there are many who are dissatisfied and resort to weapons to guarantee the desired result.

As the expert Rubén Salazar pointed out to this newspaper, “Mexico has not quite digested the alternation of power.”

Experts work at the scene of the murder of Chilpancingo's Undersecretary of Traffic, José Agustín Maldonado, on February 10.

Dassaev Téllez Adame (Cuartoscuro)

“In this country, crime continues to condition electoral processes, especially at the local level, where they have more presence and pressure capacity,” begins José Antonio Álvarez León, expert in Criminal Law and Policy at UNAM.

“And it is difficult to say when this will end because the tentacles of the de facto powers are very powerful, there are times when the alternation between one party and another in any government does not mean anything, because everyone knows who is really governing” , Explain.

However, he believes some rules could be implemented.

“If exceeding the planned expenditure for the elections is a reason for annulling a candidacy, why isn't a murder?

I think the process should be canceled and repeated later.

If everything continues, it is a sign that what happened does not matter much,” he says.

“If there were more surveillance for the transparency of the processes, maybe crime would look the other way,” says the UNAM professor.

But it does not seem that times are going in that direction, increasingly the drug traffickers, as this mafia is generically called, like to interfere with public money and the human resources of the City Councils.

The result of these crimes is that the party that the victim formed is left without its most relevant candidate, people feel afraid and there is no one who dares not to make things easier for the alleged perpetrator.

This cannot be called a democratic process in capital letters.

Political parties and crime are often subsumed in remote places.

If a party has the upper hand, crime will ally itself with that candidate, or kill anyone who overshadows its intentions; you never know what the formula is, explains Álvarez León.

“Apparently, they both win, there are many negotiations below,” he says.

It is difficult to say in Mexico if there is a lack of democracy or an abundance of criminals.

If they have not gotten used to a peaceful alternation or they are not allowed, because sometimes both things are sides of the same coin.

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