Mexico: Where Bullets are Intimidating the Ballot
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City Tuesday, Jun. 29, 2010
Last Friday, gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre raised both arms to the sky in front of 15,000 cheering white-shirted supporters in a baseball stadium minutes from the Rio Grande. After he promised security in his violence-ridden border state of Tamaulipas, the crowd erupted to his campaign anthem, sung to the catchy tune of the smash hit "I Gotta Feeling," by U.S. pop band Black Eyed Peas. They had reason for celebration. Opinion polls all concurred the mustachioed physician would win the July 4 election by a landslide of more than 30 points. But on Monday, as Torre left the state capital to conclude his campaign, assailants showered his convoy with gunfire from automatic rifles and heavy caliber weapons, killing him instantly. Army commanders said the attack bore all the signs of the Zetas, a paramilitary drug gang that was born in the state.
Mexico's most high-profile political assassination since the 1994 murder of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was a blow not only to Torre's supporters but to the nation's whole ailing democracy. On July 4, voters will choose governors in 12 of 31 states in a "Super Sunday" of local elections. The ballots come almost exactly a decade after the nation voted to end 71 years of one-party rule. But rather than showcasing the success of multiparty democracy, the campaigns have highlighted its hazards. Races have been dampened by arrests of candidates on racketeering charges, leaked tapes of organized vote buying and a succession of violent attacks. After the Torre killing, some politicians asked for half of the races to be suspended. "This is extremely worrying," says political scientist Maria Eugenia Valdes. "If there is fear and violence, there is no freedom. And if there is no freedom we cannot have fair elections."
A key problem is that many of the polls are in the states hardest hit by the relentless drug war, including Chihuahua, home to Ciudad Juarez, which has a reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican organized crime. Tamaulipas, a state that shares a border with Texas and has three of the busiest land cargo-crossing points into the United States, has this year been engulfed by bloody battles between the Zetas and their old masters in the Gulf cartel. Back in the 1990s, the cartel founded the Zetas, recruiting defectors from the army special forces to be its brutal enforcers. But the Zetas broke away to smuggle their own drugs as well as carry out rampant extortion and kidnapping. The fighting has littered the Tamaluipas streets with hundreds of bodies and led to prolonged shootouts that have shut down schools and work places.
The Zetas have also suffered — hit heavily by arrests, firefights with the army and by rival gangs in other states, including Sinaloa, where 28 of their alleged members were slaughtered in a prison riot. Such devastating losses could have led them to lash out against the establishment.
The violence in Tamaulipas has scarred all major political parties. Last month, triggermen silenced a mayoral candidate from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) of President Felipe Calderón, gunning him down in his farm supplies store along with his son in the town of Valle Hermoso. In nearby Nuevo Laredo, assassins wiped out two people close to the mayoral candidate of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), then strung up banners warning, "This is what happens to everyone who supports these f---ing people." Gubernatorial candidate Torre himself was a lifelong member of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which currently controls Tamaulipas. While focusing on law and order, the 46-year-old former federal deputy made no radical or controversial proposals.
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