Politics: Murders Show Institutional Weakness

MEXICO - Report 16 Aug 2016 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

In the past month, three mayors and a former mayor have been killed. This is not, unfortunately, a new phenomenon. In the past decade, 86 mayors, former mayors, and municipal or town council members have been assassinated. Equally unfortunate is the fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg, with attacks and acts of intimidation against municipal officials numbering in the hundreds.
Violence against local officials correlates with overall levels of violence. Between 2007 and 2010, there was an initial escalation in the killings of municipal officials. The numbers declined from 2011 to 2013. Then there was a new increase in 2014, a fall in 2015, and a dramatic jump in 2016. With some variations, this mirrored the trends in homicides. But the specific trends in assassinations of such officials reflect the extent to which organized crime has increasingly focused on local governments as sources of revenue and protection for their criminal activities. And while many such killings are routinely blamed on criminal gangs, some of the murders may also be more politically motivated. It is often difficult in many instances to determine the motive.
Unfortunately, local judicial authorities are relatively powerless or indifferent in the face of such criminal activity, but the killing of a mayor is extremely disruptive. Therefore, the national authorities should take extraordinary measures to protect mayors and punish attacks against them. But this is not what is happening. The task of investigating the killings of municipal officials is generally left to state prosecutors (only rarely has the Federal Attorney General’s Office exercised its right to assume responsibility for such investigations) and as a result, the killers of a mayor or city or town councilman have as much of a risk of being caught as any other murderer in the country. Only one in five homicides in Mexico leads to an arrest; the odds that the killer of a city official will get away with the murder are extremely high. What is surprising is not that some mayors are killed, but that there aren’t many more such assassinations.

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