A state police officer stands outside a school that will be used as a polling station, in Morelia, Mexico, on May 30.Ivan Arias/Reuters
As José Alfredo Cabrera pushed through the crowds at the closing rally for his mayoral campaign near Acapulco on Wednesday, an assailant put a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger, killing him.
As that happened, in the national capital, presidential front-runner Claudia Sheinbaum packed the central Zócalo square, where she boasted of diminishing crime under the man she is running to replace, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“The president in the morning showed the security results,” Ms. Sheinbaum told the crowd. “And I repeat that it’s important to say them, because no one else mentions them: a decrease of more than 20 per cent in intentional homicides between 2018 and 2023.”
Mexico votes Sunday in elections that will renew Congress, select nearly 20,000 state and local officials and likely produce its first female president. Ms. Sheinbaum – who leads all polls over Xóchitl Gálvez, the candidate for a three-party coalition, and Jorge Álvarez Maynez of the small Citizen Movement party – would become Mexico’s first Jewish head of state, too.
Yet the country goes to the polls amid bloodshed, even as the president and his protégé campaign on the promise of Mexico becoming a safer country than it has been over the past five years.
Drug cartels have killed candidates with impunity and criminal groups are encroaching on the political process – imposing its preferred people into public office rather than simply paying off politicians.
At least 32 candidates and potential candidates have been killed in the 2024 election cycle, according to the Violence and Peace Seminar at El Colegio de México. Integralia, a consultancy, recorded at least 749 cases of political violence over the nine months leading up to May 28 – nearly double the 382 cases recorded in the 2017-18 election cycle.
The violence coincides with the spread of the cartels, which dispute crime territories across the country and are increasingly engaged in activities beyond narcotics trafficking – such as trafficking migrants through Mexico, fencing gasoline siphoned from Pemex pipelines and extorting people involved in everything from avocado shipments to tortilla mills.
“Criminal organizations, these mafias, see that it’s highly lucrative to have the authorities in their pockets,” said Eduardo Guerrero, director of Lantia Intelligence, a security consultancy. “Territorial control allows [them] to charge taxes, to control public transport, do things like drug dealing, human trafficking, migrant trafficking and stealing gasoline,” he said.
Mexico’s fractured criminal landscape contributes to the electoral violence, too – “with competition over institutional access, including at election time, becoming very crowded,” said Falko Ernst, senior Mexico analyst with the International Crisis Group.
The Crisis Group has counted close to 200 active criminal groups in Mexico, according to Mr. Ernst. “Many times that candidates are not able to satisfy all conflicting demands they’re faced with, then the criminal groups resort to violence to get what they want.”
The federal government puts the number of candidate killings this year at only eight deaths. Mr. López Obrador has downplayed electoral violence throughout the campaign as exaggerations to make his government look bad.
“They would like there to be many homicides – it seems untrue, but they are administering human pain for political reasons,” he said recently in response to a question on the killings of candidates.
He predicted Sunday’s elections would be “the cleanest and freest in the history of Mexico. … Our adversaries, the conservatives” – an epithet he uses for opponents – “bet that there was going to be violence. They bet on that and it’s fortunately not going to be like that.”
For all the bloodletting throughout Mexico’s campaign period, security has hardly topped the agendas of most political candidates.
Ms. Gálvez kicked off her campaign in Zacatecas, one of the country’s most violent states, with a candlelight vigil and a promise of “no more hugs for criminals,” referencing the president’s stated security strategy of “hugs, not bullets.” (The strategy purports to address what Mr. López Obrador considers the root causes of crime – poverty and corruption – rather than violently confronting criminal groups.) She also promised to build a mega prison but didn’t raise the idea again.
“There will be no bigger priority in my government than your security,” she said at her closing campaign event in Monterrey on Wednesday. She spoke of more than 180,000 homicides and 50,000 disappeared persons since Mr. López Obrador took office in December 2018, calling the grim numbers “the result of a security strategy where the hugs are for criminals and the bullets are for citizens.”
Ms. Sheinbaum has promised to replicate her experience in Mexico City, where she was mayor from 2018 to 2023, and credits improved policing methods with driving down the homicide rate by more than 50 per cent.
As both a mayor and presidential candidate for the ruling Morena party, Ms. Sheinbaum has seldom strayed from Mr. López Obrador’s discourse. That includes repeating his claims that the country has pacified under his administration.
She objected to parts of a peace plan published in March by the country’s Catholic leaders, saying she disagreed with its “pessimistic” evaluation of Mexico’s security situation and concerns over “a supposed militarization of the country” – even though Mr. López Obrador has assigned the military tasks ranging from public security to building and operating airports and railways.
“This administration and its predecessor have been trying to sell a narrative that there aren’t real security problems,” Mr. Ernst said. “Admitting to the degree to which criminal interests have played a role and are a significant weight in nominally democratic elections would be a frontal assault against that narrative. So, we’ve seen a complete negation of the reality of insecurities in Mexico over the past six years.”
Polls show voters rank homicides as a top concern. But analysts say it doesn’t move many voters – at least not like promises of social programs promoted by the president, including stipends for seniors and single mothers.
“This level of mafia violence is caused by the bad guys around us, by perverted, violent people, but they do not attribute the causes to López Obrador,” said Jesuit Father Pedro Arriaga, who ministers in southern Chiapas state, where violence has forced more than 500 candidates to withdraw from their races.
Among the people he encounters, he said they’re more focused on what the government will provide them. “With this situation that we’re experiencing, the fact that I’ve received something from a program has more impact.”