2017 is set to be Mexico’s most violent year on record, with 23,101 homicide cases opened during the first 11 months of the year. These homicide cases can contain more than one victim.
A number of categories of crime saw increases in 2017, but the year also proved to be the deadliest in the past decade for Mexico’s politicians — with the final days of December seeing a spate of attacks against current, former, and prospective officials.
Throughout Mexico over the past decade, 112 current or former elected officials, including mayors and council members, have been killed, according to Mexico’s National Association of Mayors.
President Felipe Calderon of the right-wing National Action Party, who was in office from 2006 to 2012 and intensified the crackdown on drug trafficking, had 49 elected official killed during his tenure.
Sixty-three of those deaths have come under President Enrique Peña Nieto of the PRI, who took office in December 2012. His first two years in office saw the second- and third-most killings of his tenure, despite homicides nationwide falling considerably during both years. 2017 was the deadliest of those five years, with 21 mayors or former mayors killed.
In states where organized-crime groups are active or influential, politicians and officials are often threatened in order to secure their cooperation. In some cases, they develop ties to those groups. (Numerous PRI governors have been accused of corruption or of having ties to organized crime.)
According to judicial complaints, many of those officials killed have been threatened by drug traffickers who wanted protection for their illicit operations.
The National Association of Mayor’s president, Enrique Vargas del Villar, said the principal reason for the killing of most municipal leaders was refusing to collaborate with organized-crime groups
Four of the five political figures killed during the final days of 2017 were affiliated with the PRD, prompting the party’s leadership to denounce the violence and demand the government address the country’s rampant insecurity.