A mayor was shot lifeless in a restaurant in Mexico on Saturday, the regional prosecutor stated, the newest assassination in political relation within the nation stricken by violence and arranged crime.
Guillermo Torres, 39, and his 14-year-old son had been attacked in a restaurant in Morelia, the capital of western Michoacan state, the prosecutor's workplace stated in an announcement. His son survives.
He was elected mayor of the municipality of Churumuco in Michoacan as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Social gathering in 2022, however not too long ago left the celebration and publicly expressed sympathy for Morena, in keeping with native media.
ENRIQUE CASTRO/AFP through Getty Pictures
Torres is the newest politician to be assassinated in Mexico within the run-up to the June 2 presidential election, by which 20,000 native and federal positions and your entire Congress shall be voted on.
Two mayoral candidates had been murdered February 26: Miguel Angel Zavala Reyes and Armando Perez Luna of the Morena and Nationwide Motion Social gathering, respectively.
Final month, prosecutors in southern Mexico stated that the candidate for mayor
Tomás Morales was killed within the Pacific coast state of Guerrero.
Between June 4, 2023 and March 26 of this yr, 50 folks had been murdered in “episodes of electoral violence”, 26 of them concentrating on common locations, in keeping with a report by the suppose tank Laboratorio Electoral.
Mexico's drug cartels have usually targeted assassination makes an attempt on mayors and mayoral candidates, in an try to manage native police or extort cash from municipal governments.
The state of Michoacan, the primary avocado-producing area in Mexico, is the scene of fixed preventing between organized crime teams, together with highly effective ones. Jalisco New Technology Cartel.
Final month, he was a state police officer decapitated and his two bodyguards had been killed in a freeway assault in Michoacan.
Even in March, three farmers they had been killed by a bomb apparently planted in Michoacan. This got here simply days after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that an improvised explosive machine killed at the least 4 troopers in what he referred to as a “lure” probably set by a cartel in Michoacan.
Killings and kidnappings are a every day incidence in Mexico, the place almost 450,000 folks have been murdered since 2006 in a spiral of drug-related violence, in keeping with official information.
