Mexicans to Vote Amid Drug-Fueled Violence

MEXICO CITY (June 30) -- As drug-trade violence mars the run-up to a brace of elections in Mexico, a troubling figure has resurfaced as the leading mayoral candidate in Mexico's murder capital.

Hector "Teto" Murguia Lardizabal, 57, a former mayor of the violent border city Ciudad Juarez, left office in 2007 under a cloud of corruption suspicions, but he is the 2-1 favorite to win again in Sunday's elections, according to recent polls.

His possible return is only one unsettling aspect of Sunday's elections, which will take place in 14 of Mexico's states, including four of the violence-plagued states along the U.S. border. To say they occur under a bad sign is an understatement.

On Monday, Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the leading candidate for governor of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas along the Gulf of Mexico, died under a hail of gunfire while heading down a state highway in a campaign vehicle. His brother, Egidio, has been selected to replace him on the ballot.

On June 19, Jesus Manuel Lara Rodriguez, the mayor of the city of Guadalupe and a vocal critic of the drug cartels, was similarly gunned down in front of his temporary residence in Ciudad Juarez, where he had recently taken up lodging after receiving death threats in his nearby hometown.

Both Torre and Lara were members of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico unabated for most of the 20th century. Polls suggest the party is poised to sweep the country's 12 gubernatorial elections and do well in the municipal elections in 14 states -- including with Murguia in Ciudad Juarez.

For many observers, that outcome doesn't bode well for the ongoing effort to stanch the power of the cartels in the border city, where their fight for control of drug routes into the U.S. has killed more than 5,000 people in less than three years.

Three months after Murguia's term ended in 2007, Juarez police chief Saulo Reyes-Gamboa was caught smuggling a ton of marijuana across the border into El Paso, Texas. An investigation in 2006 by the Juarez newspaper El Diario found that one-third of all the city's public construction contracts had been awarded to seven companies Murguia created weeks before taking office in 2003.

Murguia's successor, current Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, said one of his first orders of business was to dismiss hundreds of city cops he suspected of being linked to organized crime and corruption.

A June poll by the polling firm Mitofsky shows Murguia holding a 2-1 lead over Cesar Jauregui Moreno, candidate for the National Action party (PAN), though almost a third of voters surveyed said they were still undecided.

Jauregui has used public debates and newspaper ads to accuse his opponent of ties to the Juarez cartel. Local newspapers carried an ad funded by Jauregui's campaign that warned: "Citizen of Juarez! Don't let yourself be deceived once again!"

Murguia denies all accusations of any ties to the narcos. "I have never had contact with a drug trafficker. I am a businessman and my whole life I've paid for everything thanks to my businesses. And I have never had to make contact with a drug trafficker," Murguia told the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso.

AOL News reached the candidate on half a dozen occasions, but he declined to answer questions.

Murguia has run a campaign pledging job creation and efforts to end the vicious crime that has swept the city since he exited office. Posters featuring the gray-haired and bespectacled candidate embracing an old woman are plastered all over the city. Murguia has engendered goodwill among some Juarez voters by handing out sacks of concrete for building homes.

Andres de Anda, an opposition leader in Juarez during Murguia's term in office, described him as "an extremely ambitious and corrupt man, a populist and a danger to society," and characterized his government as "having its pockets full of money and its hands covered in blood."

Even some members of his own party fear his re-election. Oscar Cantu Murguia, publisher of the daily El Norte and Murguia's first cousin, has said the re-election of Murguia would be a "disaster." The incumbent Reyes Ferriz, a fellow PRI member, said his predecessor's return to power would be "devastating" for Juarez.

Political violence in Juarez started to flare early into the campaign season. In May, two PRI campaign vehicles were shot at by soldiers. Several days later, a PRI campaign worker in the town of Guadalupe in the Valle, outside Juarez, was shot to death while painting a slogan on the side of a building there.

The state's elections office has tried to lure voters to the polls with free concerts and youth conferences, but many will stay home on voting day because of fear and political apathy, said Jazmin Rodriguez, a Juarez high school teacher who intended to vote for the PAN.

"People in Juarez are tired and feeling deceived. I think this year is going to lose to the apathy of a population with no motivation to vote because things remain the same," Rodriguez said.

Low voter turnout should benefit the PRI, says George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary, who predicts the party will sweep the state of Chihuahua. In Juarez, he said, "the PRI knows how to deliver the bacon."

Elsewhere in Mexico, candidates for public office in Mexico have either been arrested or wound up dead. The PAN and the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party have been unable to field candidates in two cities and half a dozen municipalities in Chihuahua.

Mexico's federal police arrested Cancun Mayor Gregorio Sanchez on May 25 for alleged money laundering and ties to drug-funded organized crime groups, Bloomberg reported. The Attorney General's Office said Sanchez, who is running for governor of Quintana Roo state where the resort city is located, had links to the Beltran Leyva and Los Zetas drug gangs, according to a statement read on television by office spokesman Ricardo Najera.

In late May a PAN candidate for mayor of Nuevo Laredo in the violent border state of Tamaulipas was assassinated. Jose Mario Guajardo had apparently received threats that he should drop out of the race. A week later, PAN's 1994 presidential candidate and a well-known attorney, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, disappeared from his ranch. A truck soaked in blood was discovered there, leading investigators to suggest he may have had implanted a GPS chip, common among Mexican politicians and businesspeople who are anxious about being kidnapped, that his attackers scored out of his shoulder blade. The Attorney General's Office has suspended its investigation at the request of the victim's family.