Gisela Gaytán had just presented her security plan for the mayor of Celaya, state of Guanajuato, on Monday, April 1. It was his first day of campaigning and also his last day alive. The home videos that recorded the brutal shooting that ended the life of the Morena candidate have thousands of views on the platforms, and her name is already part of a list of 27 applicants murdered.
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Not for nothing The 2023-2024 electoral process is already considered the most violent in the history of that country. Not only because of the murders, but because of a series of serious complaints that remain unanswered or with the worst outcomes. The Electoral Laboratory has registered 157 attacks on candidates and people related to the electoral process, of which 51 were murders, 9 kidnappings, 22 attacks and 75 threats.
However, these alarming figures do not respond to official data or a public record, but to the efforts of organizations that have been monitoring political violence for several years. This has also meant that complaints are only recorded in the media and not before the competent authorities, which gives way to impunity.
As the elections approach, The threats have increased and do not only fall on one party. According to the Electoral Laboratory’s count, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) has 10 murdered candidates, the highest number, followed by the opposition National Action Party (PAN) with five. But the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party have also reported complaints. (PRI).
“In the majority of cases of threats and intimidation, the names or charges are not made known out of fear, and in almost no case have the electoral authorities been informed of these situations,” the report details.
This record already exceeds the 43 homicides from the 2018 elections and it is feared that in the remainder of the campaign it could exceed the 88 murders recorded in 2021of which 30 were candidates or pre-candidates.
It is not true that in the last two years we have had a downward trend compared to the most violent years in the history of the country
But, as usual, he also took advantage of his usual morning to announce that at the close of the electoral period he will prove, in a report, that more journalists and candidates were murdered during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term.
However, for Saúl Arellano, researcher at the Development Studies Program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Unam), there are clear provisions on who is responsible for the protection of candidates. And furthermore, he states that “It is not true that in the last two years we have had a downward trend compared to the most violent years in the history of the country. “There is a rhetorical excess in the sense of saying that we are doing well because murders were reduced compared to 2020 and 2021, which were record years.”
In a broader account, the “Vote between bullets” project of the Data Cívica organization in alliance with the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (Cide) report that From 2018 to 2024, there have been 1,755 attacks, murders, attacks and threats against people who work in the political sphere, government or against government facilities or parties.
Mexico has a history of violence and these chilling figures pose the risk that reality will fade into oblivion and normalization. Is there a way out? Mitigating electoral violence must respond to a State policy, says Professor Cristián Castaño, director of the Faculty of Criminology and Law of the Metropolitan University of Monterrey.
“With a dislocated state in which it has 2,000 police forces and in which the command is often part of the criminal phenomenon (…) stating that we can now reactively build a State policy is too late. “We should be visualizing what we could do after the electoral process, and in these elections, activate protocols to inhibit or reduce fatal damage, although many times these are not met.”
Who kills the candidates?
There are necessary questions: Who is behind these events? Who benefits? What scope does narcopolitics have? Professor Arellano is forceful: “Mexico faces a real threat from organized crime in terms of what we could call an informal veto. The drug trafficker is vetoing democracy through capture of electoral processes and no longer only through corruption in the traditional sense. There are elements to think that there are also people who are elected and work directly for the cartels.”
Each case is particular and The characteristics of the states can determine the conditions in which these acts of violence occur. It cannot be denied that Mexican politics has a close relationship with organized crime and its structures that are difficult to dismantle.
“We have faced this since Felipe Calderón’s six-year term, it continued during Enrique Peña Nieto’s, and of course, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s ‘hugs and not bullets’ policy has not stopped it. This is a transexennial problem and now Organized crime is learning to do politics, in its own style with threats, kidnappings and murders… What do they seek? Criminal governance,” says experienced journalist Arturo Espinosa.
The drug trafficker is vetoing democracy through capture of electoral processes and no longer only through corruption
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Castaño emphasizes that organized crime is not only dedicated to illicit businesses but also to legal ones. “For example, in a mayor’s office they seek to subdue a municipal president to obtain public works contracts or control of entertainment directorates, and then impose quotas, thus the money that should go to public coffers ends up with criminal organizations” .
So much so, that Mexico leads with worrying upward trends in a recent global study of “criminal markets” published by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) and which includes 193 countries. As Espinosa says, “the problem of drug trafficking caused osmosis. There are populations completely taken over, and in a kind way, by organized crime, they are part of their lives, they are friends, they are relatives, they work with them and for them, there is very strong impunity, and it will take a lot of work to root out this problem. ”.
A mirror for Mexican citizens
They will also vote for nine state governments, the 128 seats in the Senate and the 500 deputies. Some elections that will determine the future of the country for the next six years, and that will be compromised in some way by the advance of criminal organizations.
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Many local electoral authorities do not even have the money to carry out the electoral process in its most basic version.
Precisely in a year in which half of the global population will experience electoral processes, it is inevitable to look at Mexico and that reality, which becomes a mirror in Latin America. It is no secret that several countries in the region are experiencing similar processes, such as Colombia and Ecuador, to name only the most obvious. There is a boredom that guides citizens’ decisions at the polls, and also, there are levels of violence that are cornering real democracy.
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