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Caciques may or may not have ties to organized crime, but typically belong to families that have dominated local politics, labor unions, and business for decades. Acts of intimidation and violence, including extortion, kidnapping and murder are unlikely to occur without the knowledge of the caciques and perhaps even their approval or active participation. In the state of Veracruz, for example, several criminal organizations, including the brutal Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Old School Zeta, are very present. Even so, as recent research suggests, not all violence can be attributed to these groups.
One example is the assassination of Carla Gladys Merln Castro and her daughter, Carla Enrquez Merln, both members of an influential family of caciques with a sprawling business empire that includes transportation, restaurants, shops and ranches in Veracruz. In fact, their deaths are difficult to disentangle from the family’s alleged history of political control, corruption and violence.
Forms of community violence and self-defense justice, including lynchings, also played a crucial role in electoral violence. More or less organized groups seek to exert pressure, intimidate or negotiate with public officials or candidates for elections. Their aim is to correct the behavior of politicians accused of corruption, abuse of public funds or collaboration with organized criminal groups. In states like Puebla, Oaxaca, Chiapas and Veracruz, ordinary residents of some neighborhoods have staged lynchings, riots and even kidnapped officials. A recent case concerned a threat of lynching against a candidate for mayor of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. Villagers tied a noose around his neck, stripped him of his shoes and made him walk as they berated him for not doing the job he promised during his tenure as lawmaker of state.
There was more than one actor involved in electoral violence in Mexico. We must break with the usual explanations which focus only on the actions of criminal organizations, which are often imagined as operating outside the margins of the state. In fact, unions, vigilante groups, powerful locals and state actors also play a role in violence, whether in an election or not. For them, as for organized criminal groups, violence constitutes a political language, used to claim, negotiate access to resources or influence electoral results. Beyond this election, these actors are likely to continue to use violence as a means to “play politics in other ways” as long as impunity and corruption remain an endemic feature of the Mexican political system.
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