Another local political candidate has been killed in Mexico as it gets ready to hold a historic presidential election Sunday amid a dramatic rise in political violence.
As all political candidates held their last day of campaigning Wednesday to allow for a legally mandated "reflection period" for voters, mayoral candidate José Alfredo Cabrera Barrientos was gunned down in the municipality of Coyuca de Benítez in Guerrero state during his campaign closing rally.
The person believed to have murdered Cabrera Barrientos "was killed at the scene," the attorney general’s office in the state of Guerrero, which is investigating, said in a statement Wednesday night.
Cabrera Barrientos belonged to the Broad Front for Mexico opposition coalition, which is made up of the traditional political parties that had long governed Mexico. They are the conservative National Action Party, or PAN, the small progressive Democratic Revolution Party and the old-guard Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
His killing is the most recent in a string of violent attacks against political figures since Mexico's official electoral process began in September. Since then, at least 749 instances of political violence have been reported, according to an analysis from Integralia, a public affairs consulting firm that researches political risk and other issues in Mexico.
Those include the killings of 231 people, 34 of whom were political candidates. The analysis also documented armed attacks, assaults, kidnappings, disappearances and threats against candidates, former and current public officials and politicians, as well as relatives and other collateral victims.
They represent a 150% increase in the number of victims of political violence across the country, compared with the last election season, which ended in 2021, according to Integralia.
The violence is taking place as the country holds the largest election in its history Sunday, casting votes for all 628 seats in both chambers of Congress and tens of thousands of local positions, according to the National Electoral Institute.
As violence and security remain top of mind for voters, both of Mexico’s front-running presidential candidates, Claudia Sheinbaum and Xóchitl Gálvez, officially closed their campaigns Wednesday.
One of them is expected to make history as Mexico's first female president, because Jorge Álvarez Máynez, the Citizen Movement party’s presidential candidate, is running a distant third in the polls.
Sheinbaum, of Mexico’s governing political party, Morena — founded by her mentor, the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador — held her final rally in Mexico City’s colonial-era central square and delivered a strongly nationalistic speech to a large crowd.
She promised to combat violence by continuing López Obrador’s policy of offering apprenticeships to discourage young people from joining drug cartels.
“We will deepen the strategy of peace and security and the progress that has been made,” Sheinbaum said.
“This is not an iron fist” policy, she said. “This is justice.”
Gálvez, of the opposition coalition Broad Front for Mexico, held her rally on the outskirts of Mexico City and blasted López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” policy of not confronting the drug cartels — which have taken over large parts of Mexico, extorting protection money from residents.
She also pledged to unite a nation that has been highly polarized by López Obrador’s rhetoric, saying, “Enough division, enough hatred. ... We are all Mexicans.”
