2 mayoral hopefuls shot dead in Mexican city riven by gang wars

Killings before official start of campaigning add to warnings that June 2 vote could be nation’s most violent.

MEXICO CITY — Two candidates for mayor in the Mexican city of Maravatio have been gunned down within hours of each other, as experts warn the June 2 election could be the country’s most violent on record.

The widening control of drug cartels in Mexico has been described as a threat. During the last nationwide election in 2021, about three dozen candidates were killed.

The campaigns haven’t even started yet. They formally begin Friday.

State prosecutors said Tuesday that Armando Pérez was found shot to death in his car in Maravatio just before midnight. He was the mayoral candidate for the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.

“This illustrates the extremely serious level of violence and lack of safety that prevails ahead of the most important elections in Mexican history,” PAN’s leader, Marko Cortés, wrote on social media.

Hours earlier, officials with the ruling Morena party confirmed that their candidate, Miguel Ángel Zavala, was found shot to death Monday in his car.

The Morena party state committee said in a statement that the killing of Zavala was “a cowardly and reprehensible act.” The head of the party in Michoacan, Juan Pablo Celis, said Zavala had announced his intention to run but had not yet been designated as the Morena candidate.

The western state of Michoacan has been hit particularly hard by gang turf wars, with the Jalisco New Generation cartel fighting a local gang, the Viagras, for control.

The watchdog group Civic Data said in a January report on political violence that “2023 was the most violent year in our database. And everything suggests that 2024 will be worse.”

Mayoral, state and federal elections are increasingly synchronized and often take place on the same day. “It is likely that the biggest elections in history will also suffer the biggest attacks from organized crime,” Civic Data said.

Michoacan had the fifthhighest number of attacks on politicians and government officials in 2023, behind Guerrero state to the south and Guanajuato state to the north. Zacatecas and Veracruz states also had a higher number of attacks.

Civic Data said five people intending to run for office were killed in Mexico in January.

In a report published this month, Integralia Consultants wrote that “organized crime will intervene like never before in local elections in 2024” because more mayoral offices are at stake, more cartels are engaged in turf wars, and cartels have expanded their business model far beyond drugs.

Cartels make much of their money extorting protection payments from local businesses and even local governments. That’s why mayoral races are more important to them than national elections and often become violent.