The murder of Gisela Gaytán, Morena's candidate for mayor of Celaya (Guanajuato), on Monday afternoon, has given way to the distribution of blame between federal and state authorities regarding who is responsible for protecting the lives of the candidates. to elected positions. This has been one of the most insecure electoral processes for politicians and candidates, who have been targeted by organized crime. Hours before being shot in the middle of the street, Gaytán had declared to the press that she had requested protection, as part of the mechanism designed by federal and state security agencies to take care of the applicants. His murder revealed the serious flaws of that institutional mechanism, and this Tuesday revived the confrontation over the issue of insecurity between the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the president of Guanajuato, the opposition Diego Sinhue Rodríguez (of the PAN), and his state prosecutor, Carlos Zamarripa. “The governor governs, but he does not command,” the president stated in his morning conference.
In February, the National Electoral Institute (INE), the security authorities and the political parties agreed that the federal agencies – the National Guard and the Army – would provide protection to the candidates for governor, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and the presidency of the Republic. Requests for protection from candidates for local positions—deputies, mayors, and councilors—would be sent by the INE to the state electoral institutes (Oples) and local security agencies. Officially, this year, 15 candidates for elected positions have been murdered, according to figures released this Tuesday by the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC). The majority of the victims have been, precisely, the candidates for local office, which shows that, although they are the most vulnerable, they are also the most unprotected by the mechanism.
The head of the SSPC, Rosa Icela Rodríguez, has detailed that Morena, the party in which Gaytán was a member, requested protection from the INE for various candidates for federal and local positions. The request was made in March (she did not specify the exact date). The official pointed out that the INE transferred Gaytán's protection request to the Electoral Institute of Guanajuato, in accordance with the design of the mechanism. The local institute, according to Rodríguez's account during López Obrador's conference, responded that security would not be provided to Gaytán at that time because the campaigns had not yet begun. In Guanajuato, the campaigns for mayors began last Sunday, March 31. On the second day of the campaigns, when she was murdered, Gaytán was still without protection.
To the failures of the candidate protection mechanism, we must add the specific circumstance of the State. Guanajuato, governed by the PAN since the 1990s, has a record in the six-year term among the States with the most homicides. Furthermore, Celaya, one of the most important cities in the Entity, has been a death trap for municipal police. In the last year, at least 22 agents have been murdered by organized crime.
The background of insecurity has been fueled by political tensions between both levels of Government (the president was voted for Morena, and the state governor, for the opposition PAN). This Tuesday, López Obrador once again charged the state prosecutor, Carlos Zamarripa—who has remained in that position for 15 years—for the poor results in terms of security, and has once again requested his removal, an exclusive power of the Congress of Guanajuato. , with a PAN majority. The president suggested that a factual group has been created around the prosecutor that governs the State behind Rodríguez's back, whom he referred to as “good people, not evil.” “There is a very strange relationship, like a collusion, like there is a group that rules and has more power than the governor himself,” he said.
López Obrador said that, when he assumed the presidency, he offered Rodríguez political help to remove the prosecutor. The governor not only ignored him, according to the president, but also sheltered Zamarripa. Morena has campaigned with the slogan of overthrowing the prosecutor. The presidential standard-bearer of the ruling party, Claudia Sheinbaum, stated in recent days that, to improve the security situation in the State, it is necessary to oust Zamarripa, which is why she called on citizens to vote for Morena's candidates for the state Congress, so that the party has the necessary majority to remove him from office in the next Legislature.
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