Fwd: How Cartels Became An Electoral Force
Molly Molloy
How Cartels Became An Electoral ForceGangsters move ballots with bullets and cash in Mexico's bloody elections
The mayoral candidate for Coyuca de Benítez, a town on the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Guerrero State, was shaking hands with supporters on a basketball court when the assassin came brazenly up from behind, pointed the pistol and fired. José Alfredo Cabrera, 37, who was running for the opposition alliance, died at the scene on Wednesday, the last day of campaigning before Sunday elections, in which Mexico will choose a new president as well as lawmakers, governors and mayors. The hit was filmed in a graphic video, which the picture above is taken from. Cabrera was not the only one to perish. Seconds after the assassin pulled the trigger, Cabrera’s bodyguards opened up on the killer and he too fell into a pool of blood on the court. I wonder what kind of hit-man would carry out such a blatant murder knowing they almost certainly wouldn’t make it out. “They can be forced to do it, with a threat against their family,” a journalist in the area tells me. “It was like a kamikaze.” The journalist later sent me a message circulating saying the killer’s own family had indeed been kidnapped to put the pressure on.
Cabrera’s murder topped a bloody election season with the murder of dozens of candidates (36 by one count) for different posts over a year. There were also dozens of similar murders in the run up to Mexico’s last presidential election in 2018. With such terrible impunity in Mexico, most of the political murders are never solved. But police and press point the finger squarely at the shady networks of paramilitary organized crime usually referred to as cartels. The big question though is why? Why exactly are cartels killing candidates and how else are they entwined in the electoral process? Again, the failure of prosecutions makes it tough to analyze the political murders. It’s also a sensitive issue as those slain might not always be innocent victims but involved with cartels themselves. Sources close to the cases will often point to turf wars with cartels attacking candidates who are working for a rival. Analyzing the cartel map of Mexico, you can see that a majority of the murders are in areas of dispute. Guerrero is the most fragmented front in the whole cartel war with a dozen clans battling for territory. Coyuca de Benítez falls in between forces that control sections of Acapulco and those on the other side in Técpan de Galeana. “It’s like a no-man’s land and both groups want to control it,” the local journalist said. But violence is not the only way that cartels get into politics. They have long been alleged to finance candidates, with accusations of narco money in federal campaigns going back at least to Ernesto Zedillo in 1994. And more recently, there are revelations of cartels mobilizing blocks of voters. In his revelatory interview with Luis Chaparro, the trafficker Dámaso “Mini Lic” López described the Sinaloa Cartel shifting ballots in the 2012 election. “To begin with, all the land that we controlled and the people who worked with us were given the order to vote…and their relatives and neighbors and friends and any friends they had in other towns or states. From town to town, you get several thousand votes, like one town has 3,000, another 5,000 and so on, and you get a few million…We would order someone to stand outside a voting booth…and hand out a thousand pesos to each person who would show that they voted for the one we told them to.” This description raises the specter of cartels as a significant electoral force. It also rings bells of how organized crime groups move votes in other countries, from the “posses” in Jamaica to the maras in El Salvador. It’s a mammoth challenge we need to understand to make sense of politics in the region and how this problem could spread.
A History of Mobsters Moving Votes Mobsters in the United States are also accused of moving votes… (Subscribe to read the full story and become part of the CrashOut Crew with access to the full archive and discussions)... Subscribe to CrashOut by Ioan Grillo to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of CrashOut by Ioan Grillo to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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