A woman running for mayor of a town in southern Mexico was kidnapped and beheaded by a drugs gang who left a note pinned to her body warning that any politician who did not “fall in line” would suffer the same fate.
The murder took place in Guerrero, the southern state where 43 teacher- training students were arrested by corrupt police last year during protests. They were handed over to a drugs gang, murdered and their corpses burnt.
The latest victim, Aide Nava Gonzalez, 42, was running for the left-wing Democratic Revolution party, or PRD, in the town of Ahuacuotzingo when she was abducted from a political meeting on Monday. Her headless body was found a day later with a note signed by one of the region’s most powerful drugs cartels, “Los Rojos” or “The Reds”. The note read, “This is what will happen to anyone who does not fall in line, f***ing turncoats.”
Last year Mrs Gonzalez’s husband, the town mayor, was murdered and her son kidnapped. He remains one of 25,000 Mexicans to have vanished in the nine-year drugs war.
“We are sorry for the murder of Aide Nava and demand an investigation,” said Celestino Cesareo Guzman, the PRD leader of Guerrero. “She was taken from a political meeting in the community, and lamentably they ended her life.”
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The murder last September of the 43 students from a teacher-training college in Iguala shook the country. It emerged that the city’s mayor and his wife, also members of the PRD, were in the pay of the local drugs gang and members of the police force were acting as foot soldiers for the cartel. Mass demonstrations broke out in protest at the government’s slow response to the killings, many of them calling for President Nieto’s resignation.
The students’ bodies were so badly burnt that only one has been identified, and bereaved relatives are still publicly campaigning for answers. The latest violence may renew protest against the cartels and the government’s struggle to rein them in after a decade of conflict that has cost as many as 100,000 lives.