Mexico City – As campaigners in the gubernatorial race in the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo took to the streets this month, the headquarters of the main leftist candidate were shuttered, vast posters of his smiling face covering an empty building.
The candidate himself, former Cancun mayor Gregorio Sanchez, fondly known as “Greg” by his supporters, was 2,500 miles away on the Pacific coast in a federal prison.
On June 1, a federal judge charged Sanchez with racketeering and drug smuggling charges, saying he worked with the bloodthirsty cartel known as the Zetas — an indictment that bans him from the ballot paper.
The Sanchez case is part of a dark cloud of fallout from the drug war that is causing problems in gubernatorial and mayoral elections across Mexico this year.
In other cases, candidates have been photographed at parties with notorious traffickers, aspirants have dropped out because of narco-threats, and one mayoral candidate was actually gunned down in a brutal killing.
The tensions come in the run up to a “Super Sunday” vote on July 4, in which Mexicans elect 12 of the nation’s 31 governors and mayors in another three states.
“The problems created by the drug war could stain elections in a major part of the country,” said Francisco Abundis of the polling firm Parametria. “This will be a very bad sign for Mexico’s democracy.”
A key difficulty is that many of the races are in the very states that have been hardest hit by drug-related violence, including Chihuahua, home to the murder capital Ciudad Juarez, and Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican cartels.
The Caribbean state of Quintana Roo — where millions of Americans visit the white beaches every year at Cancun and the Mayan Riviera — also has historic ties to trafficking.
It is a straight line across the Caribbean from Colombia’s north coast to the peninsula and smugglers take loads of cocaine on the route in speedboats.
In May, former Quintana Roo governor Mario Villanueva was extradited to the United States on cocaine-trafficking charges.
Federal prosecutors allege that Sanchez was following in Villanueva’s footsteps, receiving millions of dollars to protect smuggling operations while mayor of Cancun.
The prosecutors say they have evidence that Sanchez made bank withdrawals totaling $2 million, far more than his declared income, and have three protected witnesses who have testified to his corruption.
However, his Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) claims that Sanchez is being framed as part of a political witch hunt to rob them of their popular candidate.
“This is monkey business by federal prosecutors,” PRD leader Jesus Ortega said Wednesday. “They are trying to take him out of the race to impose the official candidate. We will not permit this.”
Ortega said they are appealing the charges and criticized the protected witnesses.
Sanchez’s defense team claimed the witnesses make absurd claims including one that the candidate went to an imaginary “narco-summit” in the resort of Acapulco with leaders of all the major cartels.
In 2009, federal agents arrested 12 mayors in the state of Michoacan on drug charges, many of them PRD, on the basis of protected witnesses. All but two have been released for lack of evidence, feeding claims that that was a dirty maneuver to affect last year’s elections.
In Sinaloa state, the staining of a candidate for July’s race did not come from federal prosecutors but from the press.
Reforma newspaper published a photograph of gubernatorial candidate Jesus Vizcarra of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) at a party many years ago with kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada — who has $5 million U.S. bounty on his head.
Vizacarra retorted that he has no ties to traffickers.
Across the country in Tamaulipas, over the border from Texas, elections for mayors have been marred by daily street shoot-outs between rival cartels that have left hundreds dead.
In May, gunmen in the Tamaulipas town of Valle Hermoso burst into the farm supplies business of Jose Guajardo Varela — candidate for the National Action Party of President Felipe Calderon — and shot him dead along with his son.
In three other towns in the state, National Action says it cannot field candidates because of threats from trafficking gangs.
“If there is fear and violence, there is no freedom. And if there is no freedom we cannot have fair elections,” said Maria Eugenia Valdes, a political scientist at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Mexico City.
Given such problems of violence and corruption, it is likely that many of July’s races will end up in the courts, Valdes said.
July’s elections comes exactly 10 years after Mexicans voted to end seven decades of one-party rule.
Valdes said the latest tensions show that the nation is still having real problems establishing a multi-party democracy to replace that.
“A new system, a new set of rules, has not been established yet,” she said. “Instead we have many parts of the country that are ungovernable.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy