If you’re an expat in Mexico, you may be wondering what this election has in store for us. If you’ve been following the news during this election cycle and in the year before, you’ve likely noticed a disturbing tread: a lot of candidates, particularly those running for local office, have been killed . A lot .
And that’s besides all the activists and journalists. Sadder still is the fact that the killers are pretty much completely getting away with it. This fact that leads us to a painful truth: the people who say they’re in charge are not usually the people who actually are in charge.
Why not? Like a lot of things, it’s complicated. But I think our editor Kate Bohné put it very well in her Substack essay, Bullets, not hugs . When democracy truly came to Mexico (with Vicente Fox’s election in 2000), it disturbed the uneasy, corruption-enabled peace that had been in place for decades.
It also failed to provide a mechanism for rooting out the small-time players of “the old guard” at the municipal and law enforcement levels: “ This shift exposed the “gray zones” of criminal-state collusion to the pressures of election cycles, which at a municipal level, are frequent (mayoral terms are only for three years). Under the one-party system, these local arrangements among cops, officials and smugglers were somewhat stable, but with the end of PRI hegemony, they became fractured.” AMLO’s famous phrase of “hugs, not bullets” is not turning out to be, in t.
