Relatives and friends carrying coffins that contain the remains of four men slain, in a funeral procession in Huitzilac. — AP
TAILED by trucks of heavily armed soldiers, four caskets floated on a sea of hundreds of mourners. Neighbours peered nervously from their homes as the crowd pushed past shuttered businesses, empty streets and political campaign posters plastering the small Mexican town of Huitzilac.
Days earlier, armed men in two cars sprayed a nearby shop with bullets, claiming the lives of eight men who locals say were sipping beers after a football match.
Now, fear paints the day-to-day lives of residents, who say the town is trapped unwillingly in the middle of a firefight between warring mafias.
As Mexico’s expanding slate of criminal groups see the June 2 elections as an opportunity to seize power, they have picked off more than a hundred hopefuls for local office and warred for turf, terrorising local communities like Huitzilac.
“The violence is always there but there’s never been so many killings as there are today. One day, they kill two people; the next they kill another,” said 42-year-old mother Anahi, who withheld her full name out of fear for her safety.
“When my phone rings, I’m terrified that it’ll be the school saying something has happened to my kids.”
Cartel violence is nothing new to Mexico. But bloodshed in the Latin American nation has spiked in the run-up to the elections, with April marking the most lethal month this year, government data shows.
But candidates are not the only ones at risk. Even before the election, it was clear that outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had done little more than stabilise Mexico’s high level of violence, despite pledges to ease cartel warfare.
Despite disbanding a corrupt Federal Police and replacing it with a 130,000-strong National Guard, focusing on social ills driving cartel recruitment and declining to pursue cartel leaders in many cases, killings in April reached nearly the same historic high as when Lopez Obrador first took office in 2018.
Cartels have expanded control in much of the country and raked in money – not just from drugs but from legal industries and migrant smuggling. They’ve also fought with more sophisticated tools like bomb-dropping drones and improvised explosive devices.
So far, those vying to be Mexico’s next president have only offered proposals that amount to more of the same.
“Criminal violence has become much more difficult to resolve today than six years ago. You can’t expect a quick fix to the situation; it’s too deeply ingrained,” said Falko Ernst, a senior Mexico analyst for International Crisis Group. “It is going to be even harder to unwind now” than it was when Lopez Obrador took power.
The mass shooting in Huitzilac on May 11 came after waves of other attacks, according to local media and residents.
In recent weeks alone, local media reported that three people were slain on the highway running out of town, three more were shot outside a restaurant in a neighbouring municipality. In the nearby tourist city of Cuernavaca, hit men reportedly killed a patient in a private hospital.
Josue Meza Cuevas, Huitzilac’s municipal secretary-general, said it was not clear what provoked the bloodshed. But many in the town attribute it to a turf war between the Familia Michoacana, La Union de Morelos and other cartels, which has made the state of Morelos one of Mexico’s most violent.
Huitzilac was eerily silent as businesses shuttered. Few dared to venture into the streets last week. Schools cancelled classes “until further notice” amid requests from fearful parents.
Anahi, a long-time resident of the town, and her teenage children were among many families that hunkered down in their homes, too scared to wander out in the streets.
While Cuevas said “nothing like this has ever happened”, Anahi said she has long felt death breathing down her neck.
Located little more than an hour from the hipster bars and backpacker hostels in Mexico City, Huitzilac made a name as a town just outside the law’s reach.
For years, it’s been at the centre of a tug-of-war between a rotating set of cartels and gangs, making headlines in 2012 when police inexplicably pumped a US embassy vehicle with 152 bullets. When Anahi’s car, her only means of work, was stolen from her garage last year, she said she didn’t dare report it because “they might do something to me”.
But she said she’s never been as scared as she has been since local and presidential elections began to heat up last October.
“We’re going to ask at the school meeting that they do classes remotely until the elections are over so our kids aren’t in danger,” she said.
“What would happen if there’s a shootout and our kids are there?”
Anahi heard gunshots echo from town recently and saw armed men moving outside her window.
Days before that, her son’s friend who once played at their house, was shot dead. Before that, her daughter’s friend received death threats on her phone.
Such bursts of violence are common in the lead-up to elections, especially in local races.
At least 125 candidates have been killed throughout the country this year, according to the electoral violence tracker Data Civica, while even more have been threatened, attacked and kidnapped.
That goes “hand-in-hand” with cartels warring for territory and attempts to terrorise communities into submission, said Ernst, the analyst.
“Elections are a high-stakes game for criminal groups,” he said. “You see upticks in violence as these groups try to position themselves to have a more stable negotiating position in the lead up to elections.”
Meanwhile, voters like Anahi living under the chokehold of the cartels feel disillusioned.
She said she voted for Lopez Obrador in 2018 because she hoped the leader would usher in a new era of economic prosperity and reduce violence in areas like hers.
“With the violence, I don’t know why my government, my president, doesn’t come down with a heavier hand against these people,” she said.
“I feel disappointed. I expected more.” — AP
