MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico prepared for
what could be its most violent elections in years, sending thousands of
soldiers and federal police to its southern states to protect polling stations
in voting seen as a litmus test for President Enrique Pena Nieto's government.
Midterm elections like Sunday's, which will choose
all 500 seats in the lower house of congress, nine of 31 governorships and
hundreds of mayorships and local posts, usually don't draw much turnout or
attention. But a loose coalition of radical teachers' unions and activists has
vowed to block the elections.
In the weeks leading up to the
vote, they attacked the offices of political parties in Chiapas and Guerrero,
and burned ballots in Oaxaca. Those three states are expected to be the focus
of unrest Sunday. The teachers are demanding huge wage hikes, an end to teacher
testing, and the safe return of 42 missing students from a radical teachers'
college. Those students disappeared in September, and prosecutors say they were
killed and incinerated by a drug gang. One student's remains were identified by
DNA testing.
The military and police deployment was announced on Friday.
"Mexicans have the right to
vote in peace," presidential spokesman Eduardo Sanchez said Saturday, noting
the government "will take all necessary measures within the framework of
legality" to protect the elections. Most of the nine governors' races were
too close to call, and in at least one race — for the governorship of the
northern border state of Nuevo Leon — an independent candidate was a top
contender, all of which is novel for Mexico.
"There is an enormous amount of
competition, and that is good news," said Luis Carlos Ugalde, the
country's former top electoral official. The vote comes amid widespread
discontent with politicians in Mexico, where a series of corruption scandals, a
lackluster economy and human rights concerns related to the missing students
and suspected army massacres have tarnished Pena Nieto's image and fed
anti-government protests. On a national level, the Pena's Nieto's Institutional
Revolutionary Party is seeking to preserve its commanding position in Congress,
despite the president's diminished popularity.
Violence ahead of the elections has
already claimed the lives of three candidates, one would-be candidate, and at
least a dozen campaign workers or activists. Candidates have been assassinated
in the past, but the threat to block elections is a new phenomenon. Ugalde saw
another threat in the possibility of post-election legal challenges, in part
because new electoral laws highly regulate campaign funding, advertising and
spending, and make violations a cause for potentially overturning results. "These
may be the elections with the most post-electoral conflicts in Mexico's history,"
Ugalde said.
