The murder of Abel Murrieta, candidate for mayor for Cajeme, has once again highlighted the terrible insecurity faced by the contenders in the midterm elections on June 6. The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Sonora State Prosecutor's Office have promised to prosecute those responsible who, on Thursday afternoon, killed Murrieta and seriously injured a member of his team, while both distributed flyers and propaganda on a street in the northern municipality, considered the fourth most violent in all of Mexico.

Images disseminated on social networks show the body of Murrieta lying on the ground, surrounded by pamphlets and bullet casings, while a volunteer fans him with a flag from his party. Preliminary reports indicate that the Movimiento Ciudadano candidate received a total of 10 impacts, two of them to the head. When the ambulance arrived at the scene, the victim still had vital signs, but died minutes later upon arrival at the hospital.. His last message on social networks was certainly premonitory: “A prosperous Cajeme is a Cajeme in which we can all feel safe. Any citizen should go out without worries and that is why I am with Abel, because I know that he will bring order and that he is serious,” he wrote hours before he was assassinated..

The president of Movimiento Ciudadano, Clemente Castañeda, is sure that “Abel paid for having said over and over again in his campaign that he had the courage to confront the drug traffickers and that he was going to put order as soon as he got to the mayor's office.”. President López Obrador has also regretted this “really sad” event and has assured that “there will be an investigation and those responsible will be punished”.. Statistics do not help to trust AMLO's promises since, in Mexico, 90% of murders go unpunished.

Abel Murrieta, 56, was one of the most prestigious lawyers in Sonora. Between 2003 and 2004 he was Deputy Attorney General of the State and from 2004 to 2012 he was promoted to Attorney General. From then on, he made the leap into politics, serving as a local and federal deputy for the PRI until 2015.. During the last year he had worked as a lawyer for the LeBarón family, victim of an armed attack in 2019 in which nine people (three women and six children) lost their lives.. The family representative, Adrián, denounced: “They killed my defender! Today they cowardly killed whoever decided to legally defend us. What do we call this? Rule of law?”.

The second most violent electoral campaign

Electoral campaigns in Mexico are traditionally violent periods in which groups outside the law seek to persuade, with threats and violence, the political leaders who are going to renew the institutions. On June 6, the North American country will hold the largest elections in its history, both in terms of the number of positions in dispute and the number of voters called to the polls.. That day, 93 million Mexicans will be able to participate in a process where 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, 15 of the 32 state governors and almost 20,000 local positions will be elected..

The private consultancy Etellekt has put figures into the terrible context of violence that has marked this electoral period. Since last September, when the campaign formally began, 83 politicians -including Murrieta-, 28 family members and 91 non-militant public servants have been murdered. Curiously, 88% of the victims were opponents of the government in power in the locality where they competed. The consulting firm has registered a total of 476 aggressions against politicians, which also include other types of pressures, such as threats, robberies or kidnappings. According to the Government, about 250 candidates have requested federal protection to date. These figures place the current electoral campaign as the second most violent since records have been kept, only behind that of 2018, which brought Lopez Obrador to power.