He distributed leaflets with his campaign team. An armed individual approached quietly. Abel Murrieta, candidate for mayor of Cajeme in the state of Sonora, in the northwest of Mexico, was assassinated, Thursday, May 13, in broad daylight, in a busy street of this municipality plagued by drug trafficking. It is the thirty-second candidate for the legislative and local elections of June 6 who falls under the bullets of his attackers. In the “land of narcos”, the cartels try to influence the vote by blood.
” I am not afraid ! This campaign slogan was fatal to Mr. Murrieta. This 58-year-old lawyer, former prosecutor of Sonora (2004-2012), promised to confront the local mafias. The candidate of the small Movimiento Ciudadano party (MC, social democrat) received ten bullet holes, including one in the head. The assailant also injured one of his collaborators before fleeing.
The death of Mr. Murrieta increases the death toll as the biggest poll in recent history approaches the country. A total of 83 activists and party officials have been killed since the start of the electoral process, eight months earlier, according to the risk management firm Etellekt. Mexicans will vote on June 6 to renew more than 2,000 terms, including 15 governorships, 500 federal deputies and local offices in most of Mexico’s 2,469 municipalities.
“Infiltrate the institutions”
“The scale of the ballot gives rise to fear of a massacre”, worries Ruben Salazar, director of Etellekt. Its electoral violence barometer also records 563 attacks against activists or political leaders between September 7, 2020 and May 13, 2021. “Mafia organizations do not hesitate to eliminate a candidate who does not suit them to guarantee the impunity of their trafficking, explains Mr. Salazar. First they threaten him, then attack him, set fire to his house or his campaign headquarters … If he doesn’t understand, they kidnap a member of his family. If he still doesn’t understand, they kill him. “
“The cartels do not like the political alternation which forces them to renegotiate the pacts with the local power”, explains Alejandro Hope, analyst in public security
Local politicians are the most exposed: 27 of the 32 candidates killed aspired to a term as mayor. No party is spared. But 85% of the murdered postulants were opponents of the local power they were running for, according to Etellekt. “The cartels do not like political alternation which forces them to renegotiate pacts with local authorities, specifies Alejandro Hope, a former member of the Mexican secret service, who has become a public security analyst. In addition to territorial control, the cartels seek to infiltrate institutions, the municipal police in the lead. Enough to get hold of budgets but also public contracts to launder dirty money in legal activities, such as construction, for example. “
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