Politicians being killed ahead of national elections

MEXICO CITY >> To commemorate the new year, an aspiring mayoral candidate of a small Mexican town sent a Facebook message on Sunday morning asking residents to unite to improve society.

“We only need maturity, seriousness, and responsibility to face the challenges that confront society,” Adolfo Serna Nogueda wrote.

Later that day, Serna was killed outside his home in Atoyac de Alvarez, in the western state of Guerrero.

Serna, a member of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, was one of at least five politicians killed in the past week in Mexico on the eve of an important election year. Two days earlier, the mayor of another Guerrero town, Petatlan, about two hours north along the coast, was killed while eating with friends at a restaurant. And the day before, a state congressman from Jalisco was gunned down while driving with his son. A former state congressional candidate and a town councilman also were killed in the past week.

The spate of violence was another reminder of the grave dangers inherent in Mexican politics, particularly at the local level, where drug gangs regularly exert influence. It has also prompted politicians from different parties to call for tighter security measures and to demand justice ahead of the elections taking place for more than 3,400 positions at all levels, including president, this summer.

Four of the five politicians killed were affiliated with the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD. Top party officials have condemned the wave of violence and have asked to meet with federal officials to discuss the cases.

“We are six months from the presidential election and of course these attacks against our members are taken as a warning against participating,” Angel Avila Romero, secretary general of the PRD, said last week, according to El Universal newspaper.

The killing of politicians has been a recurring problem in Mexico in recent years. Since President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration began in 2012, 61 current or former mayors have been slain, up from 49 killed in the previous administration, according to a count by the National Association of Mayors.

“We have called on the president asking for an immediate meeting to implement a security protocol for mayors,” Enrique Vargas del Villar, the president of the association, said in a phone interview. “The insecurity cannot continue this way in our country.”

Vargas del Villar said that mayors needed direct phone lines to the Interior Ministry to report any threats against them so that federal officials could intervene.

In states where drug gangs and cartels maintain a strong presence, local officials are at the greatest risk. Some have ties to criminal groups while others face extortion demands or other threats, according to security experts.

The mayor of Petatlan and a member of the PRD, Arturo Gomez Perez, was shot at point-blank range on Friday inside a restaurant in his town in front of several witnesses, according to local news reports. After the shooting, the governor of Guerrero, Hector Astudillo, called it a “cowardly and cunning crime” against a man “who behaved correctly and with great commitment to his people.”