A mayor was shot dead at a restaurant in Mexico on Saturday, according to the regional prosecutor’s office, the latest politically motivated death in a country beset by violence and organized crime.
Guillermo Torres, 39, and his 14-year-old son were attacked at a restaurant in Morelia, the capital of western Michoacan state, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office. His son has survived.
He was elected mayor of Michoacan’s Churumuco municipality as a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 2022, but he recently left the party and expressed his support for the ruling Morena, according to local media.
Torres is the latest politician assassinated in Mexico ahead of the presidential elections on June 2, which will choose 20,000 local and federal seats as well as the entire Congress.
On February 26, two mayoral candidates, Miguel Angel Zavala Reyes of the Morena and Armando Perez Luna of the National Action Party, were killed.
Last month, prosecutors in southern Mexico claimed that mayoral candidate
Tomás Morales was assassinated in Guerrero, a state on the Pacific coast.
According to a report by the Laboratorio Electoral think tank, 50 individuals were killed in “episodes of electoral violence” between June 4, 2023 and March 26, this year, with 26 of them vying for popular positions.
Mexico’s drug gangs have frequently targeted mayors and mayoral candidates for assassination in order to exert influence over local police or extract money from municipal governments.
Michoacan state, Mexico’s largest avocado-producing region, is rife with violence from organized crime gangs, including the formidable Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
Last month, a state police officer was reportedly decapitated and her two bodyguards were killed in a highway attack in Michoacan.
In March, three farmers were killed by an apparent bomb planted in Michoacan. This came just days after President Andrés Manuel López Obrador admitted that an improvised explosive device killed at least four soldiers in what he described as a “trap” constructed by a cartel in Michoacan.
According to government figures, killings and abductions occur on a daily basis in Mexico, where nearly 450,000 people have been slain since 2006 as a result of drug-related violence.