Violence in 2 states as Mexicans vote in tense mid-term elections

Source: McClatchy

MEXICO CITY — Masked assailants Sunday blocked access to voter precincts or burned ballot boxes in more than a dozen towns in the southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero as voting in tense mid-term elections elsewhere unfolded with only minor disruption.

Thousands of soldiers and federal police patrolled Oaxaca and Guerrero, and the neighboring impoverished states of Chiapas and Michoacan, hotbeds of grievances against the government and Mexico’s electoral system.

Shortly before noon, Lorenzo Córdova, head of the National Electoral Institute, said more than 99 percent of precincts had opened and were operating normally in the elections for the 500-seat lower house of Congress, legislators in assemblies in 16 states, nine governors and hundreds of mayors.

"We are defending the vote as the best way to exercise our democratic rights," Córdova said.

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