President of Mexico Lopez Obrador expressed his sadness over Gisela Gaytan’s passing and said it “hurts a lot” that his party’s candidate was killed, but he did not declare an increase in security for elected officials.
Authorities in Celaya, central Guanajuato state, reported that mayoral candidate Gisela Gaytan was shot and killed when she started her campaign. The leader of Mexico has expressed grief over her passing.
While expressing his sadness over her passing on Tuesday and stating that it “hurts a lot” that his party’s candidate was killed, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador chose not to declare an increase in security for public officials.
Her murder on Monday is the most recent in a string of killings that have claimed the lives of 22 candidates in the 2023–2024 election cycle.
This has left us grieving, stunned, and furious. We are going to halt our campaign,” declared Alma Alcaraz, a different candidate running for the Morena party in government.
This year’s general election in Mexico has seen an uptick in electoral violence as organized crime members have attacked and threatened all political parties.
Gaytan ran for mayor of Celaya, one of the most violent municipalities in Mexico, on behalf of Morena, the ruling party.
Her campaign had scarcely begun when she was killed.
Ricardo Sheffield, Morena’s Guanajuato Senate candidate, claims that attempts to get security for Gaytan and other state candidates running for local posts were unsuccessful.
Sheffield accused Guanajuato Governor Diego Sinhue Rodriguez Vallejo, during a press conference, of failing to take the appropriate precautions to shield local candidates because his state is “the most insecure state in all of Mexico.”
Guanajuato recorded 401 killings in the first three months of the year, making it the most dangerous state in the nation by March.
Following Gaytan’s death, two mayoral candidate assassinations have been registered by the state.
assassinations of political figures
Guillermo Torres, the mayor of the Churumuco town in Michoacan, was shot and killed at a restaurant on Saturday.
March also saw the assassinations of three mayoral candidates: Puebla (center), Guerrero (south), and Jalisco (west).
Alejandro Lanuza Hernandez, a National Action Party [PAN] candidate for mayor of Salvatierra, Guanajuato, was similarly assassinated on October 12, 2023.
Eighteen out of twenty-two murders since 2023 have been committed by criminal groups targeting mayoral candidates.
There have been sporadic instances of assassinations of federal and municipal office candidates.
While election violence has affected all seven major parties in Mexico, the Morena party has claimed the highest number of deaths, with four candidates slain during this year’s campaign route.
Guerrero, in the southwest of the nation, is the state with the highest number of documented mayoral candidate murders—five—followed by Michoacan, which has three murders, then Guanajuato, Jalisco, Veracruz, Chiapas, and the State of Mexico, each with two cases.
According to official data, since initiating a contentious military operation in 2006 to combat drug use, Mexico has reported approximately 450,000 deaths, with the majority of these killings being attributed to criminal conflict.
On June 2, general elections are slated to take place in Mexico. All 128 senators and 500 members of the Chamber of Deputies will be chosen by the electorate, along with a new six-year president.
SOURCE: TRTWORLD
