A new report by Laboratorio Electoral, a think tank which studies political dynamics in the United Mexican States, is claiming that over 30 Mexican politicians have been murdered during this year’s election season, with many more suspending their campaigns and dropping out in the face of death threats, attempted assaults, and other intimidation tactics.
The Texas Standard spoke to Mexico City-based political reporter Elías Camhaji about the violence and intimidation of this sporadically deadly election season.
“We’re looking at organized crime organizations who are looking to exercise control, political control. In some regions, they are establishing who is allowed to run and who isn’t. And that’s very worrying because after many electoral processes, the lines between the state, the authorities and the criminal organizations are very blurry. You know, you don’t get to see the difference anymore,” Camhaji told The Texas Standard.
However, Camhaji insisted that the violence was not a partisan matter limited to one or another political faction—rather, it was a reflection of deeper elements inherent to Mexican politics, in which the intimidation of the cartels are a terror to both left and right.
“All the parties have been affected, actually,” Camhaji added in the aforesaid inteview. “Morena, which is the ruling party, is the political organization that has faced the most killings during this election. 11 candidates have been killed from the ruling party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president. Second is the most powerful opposition party, Partido Acción Nacional. You cannot blame this on one party or the other. In reality, what we’re seeing is that in some regions, political parties that are rivals actually are sharing tips about where it’s safe to do a campaign to do a rally, even though they are competing against each other.”
When asked about possible policy changes which could make elections safer for political candidates, Camhaji opined about many of the political obstacles to implementing such changes, suggesting that doing so would undermine both the government’s popularity and the opposition’s ability to use the problem to attack the government.
“Well, on one side, we have the government who is very reluctant to recognize this reality because that makes them look bad. But on the other extreme, we have the opposition who is weaponizing this problem and trying to put the government under pressure and to say that the situation is no longer sustainable,” Camhaji told the Standard.
“There are many proposals on the presidential side, but actually what we’re seeing is that this is a local phenomenon. We had the second presidential debate last Sunday and violence and insecurity was a huge issue. But far from that reality, far from the lights of the media, we’re seeing candidates facing very difficult conditions and great dangers,” Camhaji added in the same interview. “We haven’t reached a place in the debate where we can discuss actual solutions for this. We’re contaminated, so to say, by the political campaign. We see everything affected by that battle, so to say.”
Mexico’s elections, exactly one month from today, are slated to be a major landslide victory for the ruling party MORENA—a left-wing party led by populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known by his acronymic nickname AMLO, whose tenure has been marked by a combative stance towards Mexico’s northern neighbor.
AMLO’s ideology is characterized as chiefly populist and anti-neoliberal, combining resolutely socialistic economic policies with some socially conservative leanings and skepticism of the medical establishment’s stances on COVID-19. Consequently, AMLO has been compared to both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—though AMLO has denied any resemblance to the former.
Though AMLO is term-limited from seeking re-election, his party has chosen as its nominee the former Mexico City Head of Government Claudia Sheinbaum, who seems poised for a blowout success in June—likely attributable to a seemingly strong Mexican economy, despite concerns from rising crime.
Sheinbaum, despite emerging as the standard bearer for a party whose abbreviated name literally means “brown,” does not herself possess any indigenous Mexican heritage and is instead descended from Eastern European Jews, who migrated from Lithuania and Bulgaria in the 1920s and 1940s, respectively.
Sheinbaum’s helm of the notably populist political party has resulted in some awkward moments, such as when the Jewish politician was photographed in 2022 wearing a flashy traditional-style Mexican dress adorned with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, despite her own faith’s notable denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Claudia Sheinbaum es judía, pero le resulta más lucrativo usar la imagen de la Virgen de Guadalupe para conectar con la perrada.
Un maldito asco la tipa. pic.twitter.com/lWJLRmjhNm
— Luis González (@luis_gj) June 13, 2022
Nonetheless, Sheinbaum’s poll numbers suggest that Mexican voters are generally unconcerned with these contrivances and aberrations from the positions of her popular predecessor, or at least willing to overlook them in favor of their support for the MORENA political party. The most recent data from polling aggregator AC/COA shows Sheinbaum with a commanding lead of 58 percent as of last month against two major rivals.
Sheinbaum’s distant second-place rival is Xóchitl Gálvez, with 35 percent support as of March. Galvez is representing the eclectic Strength and Heart for Mexico coalition, an unlikely alliance of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years), the National Action Party (PAN, who were until recently the chief rivals of the PRI and who ended the decades of PRI rule in the 2000 Presidential Election), and Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD, which was co-founded by none other than MORENA incumbent AMLO as a left-wing alternative to the PRI). Strange bedfellows, indeed.
An even more distant third place is held by Jorge Álvarez Máynez of the Citizen’s Movement (MC), who at eight percent support merits a single, cursory sentence of acknowledgement.
The post More Than 30 Politicians Killed in During Campaigns for Upcoming Mexican Elections appeared first on Resist the Mainstream.
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Author: Nicholas Dolinger
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