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.
On December 24, an activist from the center-left party Citizens’ Movement was found shot dead in western Jalisco. On December 28, Saul Galindo, a state congressman and mayoral candidate from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, was shot and killed in the same region.
The breakdown in Mexico’s narco underworld is putting politicians in the line of fire (Photo: Yahoo News)
On December 29, Arturo Gomez, the PRD mayor of the town of Petatlan on Guerrero’s Pacific coast, was shot three times through a window of a restaurant where he was dining with friends, dying later at a hospital.
December 30 saw three killings. Juan Jose Castro Crespo, a former state congressional candidate from the center-right Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was killed in Baja California. Gabriel Hernandez, a town-council member from the PRD in Jalapa in Tabasco, was found stabbed to death in his home. Mariano Catalan Ocampo, a PRD member who was municipal director of general services and was expected to run for mayor, was shot in the downtown of tourist city of Zihuatanejo on Guerrero Pacific coast.
On December 31, Adolfo Serna, a PRI mayoral candidate, was shot dead in his hometown of Atoyac de Alvarez, also on Guerrero’s Pacific coast, just hours after posting a Facebook message urging locals to unite to improve society.
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Source: Business Insider