Electoral campaign in Mexico comes to an end overshadowed by violence

Shaken by a series of attacks and assassinations of candidates, Wednesday comes to an end in Mexico the official campaign for the general elections that are shaping up to be historic due to their size and because they will bring a woman to the presidency for the first time.

Four days before the elections, the three presidential candidates are preparing to close their campaigns with rallies in the capital, the center and the north of the country in a last effort to consolidate their voter bases and try to move the preferences that favor Claudia Sheinbaum, the candidate of the ruling Morena party.

The campaign, which formally began in March, ends with at least 27 candidates murdered and more than 60 attacks on politicians, according to figures from the local organization Data Cívica, which is carrying out an investigation into electoral violence in the country. The deaths and attacks have made this year’s election one of the most violent in recent history, surpassed by the 2018 elections, when 152 murders of politicians were reported.

The violent events revealed how organized crime has penetrated Mexican politics, especially in the state and municipal government elections where the largest number of victims were reported.

“What we saw was the tactic of political assassination as a resource for the territorial domination of the cartels,” stated political consultant David Saucedo when stating that during the campaign it was evident “an advance of narcopolitics.”

Despite the context of insecurity that predominated in the campaign, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador dismissed the situation and assured this week that the violent incidents were “very localized.”

The federal government deployed 3,474 members of the Armed Forces to provide protection to 553 candidates. In the elections on June 2, in addition to the president, eight governors, the mayor of the capital, some 19,000 local officials and 628 congressmen will be elected.

The race was also dominated by polarization, which has marked Mexico for decades, and the debate between the consolidation of the political project that López Obrador began when he came to power in 2018, known as the “Fourth Transformation”, and the return of traditional parties.

While the former mayor of the capital Sheinbaum focused her offers on the continuity of the social policies and programs of the López Obrador government, her rival, the former opposition senator violence.

Mexico closed 2023 with around 30,000 murders, consolidating the trend of recent years with similar figures, according to data from the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection.

Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old scientist, also used her mentor’s speech attacking the traditional parties of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – which governed Mexico for 71 years -, National Action (PAN) and the Democratic Revolution (PRD). ensuring that the victory of his candidate Gálvez would represent the return of the corrupt governments of the past.

Under the slogan “Let’s go for a Mexico without fear,” Gálvez—a 61-year-old engineer and technology entrepreneur—focused her campaign on attacking López Obrador’s security, health, and education policies in an attempt to consolidate the support of the government’s most radical adversaries.

Meanwhile, former deputy Jorge Álvarez Máynez, from the minority opposition Citizen Movement party, focused his electoral strategy on attracting young voters and part of the sectors dissatisfied with the government and the traditional parties.

The campaign of Álvarez Máynez, 38, suffered a blow on May 23 during a political event in the town of San Pedro Garza García, in the northern state of Nuevo León, when nine people died and two hundred were injured after the fall from the stage where the opponent was giving a speech.

State authorities alleged that the structure collapsed as a result of “atypical winds” that hit the community for several minutes, but analysts maintain that the state Civil Protection did not heed the recommendations made a day before the event by the government’s National Water Commission, which reported that in the northern states of Nuevo León, Coahuila and Tamaulipas, the “possible formation of whirlwinds or tornadoes” and winds with gusts of 50 to 70 kilometers per hour.

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