Thread: Mexico elections: violence reported as states vote for new governors

Sounds like they way these same people act at an anti Trump rally. It appears to be another cultural thing that is not a good fit with this country.
Mexico elections: violence reported as states vote for new governors

Officials in Veracruz – the biggest prize in the gubernatorial races – report home attack, kidnapping and threatening text messages warning people not to vote

Government and political leaders reported scattered incidents of election-related violence in Mexico on Sunday, as 12 states voted for new governors. elections cast light on governors – and st

In Veracruz, a two-party alliance backing an opposition candidate complained of attacks against party members in seven municipalities, including vehicles being burned and gasoline bombs thrown at a party office in the state capital of Xalapa.

José Mancha Alarcón, the state leader of the National Action party, said attackers burst into the home of the mayor of Acajete and set it on fire. In the town of Emiliano Zapata, near Xalapa, a severed human head was left in a park just steps from a polling station.

Veracruz state public security secretary Arturo Bermúdez confirmed that a driver for a local lawmaker was kidnapped. The lawmaker is part of the opposition alliance’s gubernatorial campaign.
Threatening text messages warning people not to vote were sent to cellphones in Veracruz.

The newspaper El Universal reported that attackers with clubs and stones damaged dozens of buses carrying campaign material in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa. It said a mob in the southern state of Oaxaca burned some ballots and threatened to prevent polling stations from opening, while in Zacatecas a gasoline bomb was tossed at the door of the state congress.

Veracruz is the biggest prize in the gubernatorial elections, which could shape the fortunes of the country’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary party in its bid to hold on to the presidency in 2018.

In five of the 12 statehouses up for grabs, including Veracruz, the party has ruled uninterrupted for more than 80 years.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...lence-veracruz

'There are two governments': Mexican elections held in shadow of the cartels

Exasperated residents say they’re voting on local issues, which doesn’t mean roads, taxes and schools – it means kidnapping, extortion and unsafe highways

Every month, Antonio pays a fee of about $3 a day for the right to drive his taxi in this city some 200 miles south of the Texas border. The payment doesn’t go to his local government; it goes to the Zetas, an organized crime group with a reputation for violence so extreme that Antonio – like most locals – cannot even bring himself to utter their name.

He never works nights – it’s not safe to go out. Days are slow too: shootouts are common, and most people stay off the streets whenever they can.

But Antonio doesn’t blame the lawlessness in Ciudad Victoria on organized crime. He pins the blame on Mexico’s politicians – especially the incumbent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

“The feeling right now is that people are blaming the PRI for all that we’re going through,” says Antonio, while waiting for a fare at a taxi stand by the central square. “Nobody – and I mean nobody – likes the PRI.”

Twelve Mexican states hold gubernatorial elections on 5 June, including Tamaulipas, where voters are flirting with the unthinkable: throwing out the PRI, which has ruled the state for 86 uninterrupted years.

The elections arrive as PRI president Enrique Peña Nieto’s popularity hovers at historic lows and PRI candidates across the country confront upstart challengers in traditional strongholds.
Exasperated residents say they’re voting on local issues; in Tamaulipas that doesn’t mean roads, taxes and schools – it means kidnapping, extortion and highways so unsafe no sane person travels without a convoy.

The PRI has responded with attack ads and accusations that its rivals have ties to the drugs trade and armed groups.

The national PRI president, Manlio Fabio Beltrones, recently revoked the candidacies of three Tamaulipas mayoral candidates, who openly backed the National Action Party (Pan) campaign, alleging they were “bought and threatened by criminals”.

Allegations of criminal complicity in the region are nothing new: two former PRI governors, Tomás Yarrington and Eugenio Hernández, face criminal charges in Texas courts and are considered fugitives from US justice.

Prosecutors allege Yarrington accepted bribes to allow the Gulf cartel to smuggle cocaine into the United States, while Hernández is accused of conspiring to launder monetary instruments. Both men deny any wrongdoing.

And the irony of the PRI calling out its rivals as complicit with criminals isn’t lost on the party’s opponents.

They describe a parallel power structure in the state, charging for protection, setting up illegal highway checkpoints and even providing emergency relief in poor barrios after hurricanes hit.
“There are two governments here,” said former presidential candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota, at a PAN campaign event in Tamaulipas. “There’s a government from 9am to 6pm and another from 6pm to 9am. The first was elected and the second imposes itself through kidnappings, extortion, disappearances, bullets and death.”ybody': the Mexicans caught up in the drug war just south

Shaped like a bloated No 7 and stuffed into the most north-easterly corner of the country, Tamaulipas was once known as the historic home of Mexico’s oil industry, but is now notorious as a hotbed of corruption and contraband.

Drug cartels have operated here for decades, but didn’t prey on local populations or involve themselves in state politics until the 1990s. According to three opposition gubernatorial candidates, the rot set in when local parties turned to organized crime bosses for help in close elections.

“Politicians let them in so they could keep themselves in power. But these bastards started making demands on politicians,” says Gustavo Cárdenas, a congressman running for governor with the small Citizen’s Movement party. “They started demanding quotas – public works contracts, operating waterworks, transit police and municipal police. They [still] have a ton of people working for municipal governments,” he said.

Security in Tamaulipas unraveled in 2010 when the Gulf cartel’s armed wing – Los Zetas – turned on their masters, ending the state’s pax mafiosi and unleashing wave after wave of violence as splintering cartel factions contested territory.

The scale of the criminality is terrifying: thousands have died; entire busloads of travelers were hauled from the road and massacred; one cartel somehow installed a network of 120 security cameras in the city of Reynosa without the authorities intervening; gunmen overrun farms and kidnap every employee; an estimated 3,600 ranches in the state have simply been abandoned,
The bloodletting has also hit the political class: in 2010 the PRI candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantú (the current governor’s brother) was assassinated on the eve of an election he was overwhelmingly expected to win.

Everyone seems to have a story of violence.

At a Cárdenas rally in Ciudad Victoria, Fernanda, an 18-year-old student who was fearful to offer her full name, said her pregnant half-sister and brother in law were killed in a 5pm shootout near her school earlier this year.

“There hasn’t been justice,” she said.

PRI president Enrique Peña Nieto’s popularity is hovering at historic lows. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/ReutersImpunity is widespread, and press coverage of the violence is minimal: the cartels control much of the state’s media through threats and bribery. Social media has filled the information void: in some cities, Twitter lights up during shootouts.

“We’re still censoring in some ways,” says Ramón Cantú Deándar, an independent mayoral candidate in Nuevo Laredo and former director of the newspaper El Mañana in the border city. The newspaper’s editor was murdered in 2004 and its offices were attacked twice with grenades and assault rifles, forcing El Mañana to abstain from covering violence.

Political coverage tilts toward the PRI – something three local reporters acknowledged during the PAN campaign in the oil town of Tampico.

“We’ve been attended to well by the PRI,” said one of the reporters, who described receiving payments from various mayoral candidates. Another member of the trio asked a Guardian reporter to relay a message to the Pan candidate, who was lunching at the same event: “Please tell him to look our way or we’ll get rough with the Pan.”

A recent poll from Consulta Mitofsky put the Pan candidate, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, in the lead. He campaigns in cowboy boots, snaps endless selfies with supporters – hands outstretched with the “hook ’em horns” gesture from the University of Texas – and talks tough on issues such as corruption and insecurity.

“Tamaulipas is in first place with the number of children aged 12 to 17 charged with federal offenses,” which include drugs, weapons and organized crime, Cabeza de Vaca said a recent Pan rally in the oil town of Tampico.

“If we don’t do something about this, these kids will become the next generation of hitmen, extortionists and kidnappers. We’re condemning ourselves as a society.”

Police patrol car escorts vehicles with civilians along the gang-infested Matamoros-Ciudad Victoria highway in Tamaulipas state. Photograph: Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty ImagesIn a post-rally interview over beef nachos and bottled water, the Texas-educated Cabeza de Vaca switches easily between English and Spanish – though when talk turns to touchy security topics, he says, “Let’s talk in English,” and lowers his voice.

“What’s the risk? Fighting the system that’s colluded with organized crime,” he says. “We’re not fighting the PRI. We’re fighting the system. There are more good people than bad guys. And we’re gathering up the good guys.”

Cabeza de Vaca has himself come under scrutiny for the purchase of an apartment in Mexico City which the newspaper Reforma said was worth $2.7m. He has said the apartment was only worth $760,000 and has denied any wrongdoing.

But despite the opposition’s upbeat rhetoric, the PRI machine is still formidable, plying poor voters with handouts – sacks of beans, rice and cooking oil – and warning those who vote for the opposition that they’ll lose their social benefits.

Fernanda, the student whose sister was slain in a shootout, says PRI activists threatened to take way her scholarship of 1,500 pesos per month if she didn’t work on its campaign.
The campaign of the PRI candidate, Baltazar Hinojosa, didn’t respond to interview requests.

Back in Ciudad Victoria, a shoeshiner named Juan Carrizales gave his own reason for voting for the incumbents: “They brought cans of shoe polish.”

When asked about other issues such as corruption and insecurity, he pulled out a union card emblazoned with the PRI logo. “We’ve always supported the PRI,” he said.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...s-drug-cartels

Sounds like the PRI and Democrats have similar political philosophy.NM

The newspaper El Universal reported that attackers with clubs and stones damaged dozens of buses carrying campaign material in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa. It said a mob in the southern state of Oaxaca burned some ballots and threatened to prevent polling stations from opening, while in Zacatecas a gasoline bomb was tossed at the door of the state congress.

See how they act - they want to do that here in the USA too. Look at the violence in San Diego toward Trump supporters. It is dangerous to have millions of illegal mexicans here and exploding with babies too.

Mexico is owned by the drug cartels. There is no "Proud Mexico". Mexico is a shameful place. The evidence of their drug cartels and illegal aliens pouring into our country to run the drug business is self-apparent to anyone with at least 2 live brain cells still connected. For "Mexican Americans" to put their "pride" for Mexico above their pride for the United States says it all. Most Americans whose "heritage" is from Mexico are fed up with Mexico, that's why they came here to begin with or were here already when we won the war and purchased the lands. They could have left and gone to Mexico but the United States made is possible for them to remain here if they wanted to, and I believe most did.

It's time for the media and all the others still on the take with the drug cartels doing their open borders bidding to support the cartels and other criminal organizations out of Mexico to STOP with their "Latino" heritage, END their "Hispanic" bull, and TERMINATE any and all false phony adoration for a foreign nation that doesn't deserve one minute of their time, let alone loyalty. It's time for all Americans no matter where your ancestors came from to unite together to stop this illegal alien nonsense and false pride about a foreign nation that did nothing for them and support the nation of residence and citizenship which means supporting fellow Americans trying to stop illegal immigration and foreign drug cartels exploiting our open borders to feed the beast of pure unadulterated evil.

And if you need a Poster Ass of that evil, just look to Vincente Fox.

You like your "Mexican Culture"? Then play your beautiful music in our streets and serve Mexican food in our restaurants. Besides food and music, what else is there to a "culture"? That's it. Americans love both. But leave your Cinco de Mayo down there where it belongs, because it means absolutely nothing in the United States just as you should leave your tribal flags down there where they belong, because they mean less than nothing in the United States. They both make you look stupid and lost like you're in the WRONG COUNTRY.

You want to be Americans, then start acting like Americans, And that goes to all the lawyers, judges and law students who are part of La Raza. To those I can only ask "who in the hell do you think you are?" Some special class of above the law, above the creed, above the norm special people because you or your ancestors are from some Spanish speaking country? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? We don't give a damn what language your parents or grandparents or great grandparents spoke eons ago. If you're American Citizens why would you care? Americans don't care where their ancestors came from. It's totally irrelevant. And to want to glorify coming from south of our border, I mean that really is funny. Why not get on the rooftops and shout "I'm from a third world pig sty?" That's just totally inane and silly, unbecoming really of "attorneys, judges and law students" in the United States.

This is the year of telling it like it is. And every American needs to do likewise. This foreign crap operating inside our country must end, right here, right now.

The "I'm special and above the law because I'm Latino" is ... OVER.

The United States must end the war on drugs, legalize and regulate, tax under the FairTax and educate on the real consequences of using drugs, run the trade A to Z top to bottom by license US Citizens Only, a domestic trade only, no imports no exports, use some of the FairTaxes on the drug sales only drug users pay to underwrite better education and free rehab on demand without stigma and stop worrying about it. This will SHUT DOWN the drug cartels In Mexico and give the Mexican people the first chance in many many lifetimes to take their own country back from the cartels who stole it right out from under them and who are trying to steal ours out from under US.

Preach it, lobby it, make it happen. This has nothing to do with morals or religion. This has solely to do with the right thing to do to save our nation, to save our citizens, and give US all a chance to regain our territory and nation state. It's about politics. Nothing else. If you don't believe in using drugs, then don't buy them. If you're worried about your kids, then don't give them the money they can use to buy drugs, and it's your job, not society's, to know where they are, what they are doing and who they are doing it with.

So good luck Mexican states with electing your new Governors. We wish you well.

very good judy
Good luck mexican state when you electing your new Gov . be sure of who you all pick check him or her out very well

And they are bringing it to our soil...at OUR elections!

No papers...no entry...no rights...no anchor baby...no freebies...no asylum...no refugees.

All are liars and need to be sent back. "Operation Return to Sender". And never allowed to apply to come back.

Sell out, pack up and move out before you are caught.

RETURN TO SENDER!!