Mexico City, June 25 (teleSUR-RHC)-- A Mexican mayor-elect was killed on Tuesday night at a bus station in the municipality of Jerecuaro, located in the lowlands of the central northern state of Guanajuato.
Rogelio Sanchez, from the infamous Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (PVM), was elected in June’s midterm elections to govern the town of Jerecuaro, which borders the violence-hit Michoacan state. Two other people were also killed by the unidentified gunmen. Sanchez was going to take office in October, he had already been mayor of Jerecuaro for the conservative National Action Party (PAN) from 2009-2012. While he was in the post his public safety director was assassinated.
Mexico's latest midterm elections were marred by several violence events, 11 candidates were killed and there were ballot-burning incidents reported in several restive states in southern Mexico in an attempt to boycott the vote.
Violence affiliated to drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico has exploded over the past decade. It coincides with former President Felipe Calderon’s so-called “War on Drugs”; his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, has largely maintained the same policies.
Estimates set the death toll during the War on Drugs at more than 120,000 between 2006-2013, with an additional 27,000 missing. During Peña Nieto's tenure there have been nearly 60,000 killings related to violence, surpassing the total violent deaths during the same period under his predecessor Calderon by more than 14,000 deaths.
