A mayoral hopeful and five additional individuals were fatally shot during a rally in the turbulent state of Chiapas, Mexico.
The police said a little girl and mayoral candidate Lucero Lopez Maza were among the six people who were shot and killed on Thursday night. Two more people got hurt, said.
Prosecutors said that there was a fight between armed regular people at a political event.
It was not clear if Lopez Maza was the intended person in the attack, because shootings happen a lot in that area.
The shooting happened at a crossroads in a small town called La Concordia, Chiapas. It’s about 80 miles (125 km) from the border with Guatemala.
The area close to the border of Guatemala is a big route for smuggling drugs and people, and two big drug groups in Mexico are fighting to control that area.
On Sunday, 11 people died in a shooting in a village near La Concordia, Chiapas. The killers killed a whole family and set their bodies on fire.
On Friday, the Roman Catholic Church said that people from a group selling drugs had murdered some people in Chicomuselo because the people living there didn’t want to leave their homes or work for the group.
According to the statement by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, some people didn’t want to leave their homes even though criminal gangs were being violent and threatening them to join their group.
The church said that in Chiapas there is a lot of fighting over land and some criminal groups want to keep mining there, which is causing a lot of violence.
It didn’t say which mines the cartels were trying to control, but the accusation is not surprising or unusual in areas of Mexico where cartels are in charge. In 2013, officials in the western state of Michoacan admitted that the Knights Templar cartel had gained control of iron ore mining in the state. They said selling ore to China was one of the cartel’s main ways of making money.
The increase in violence in Chiapas made President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador feel bad when he visited the border state on Friday to meet with Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo.
As always, Lopez Obrador doesn’t want to deal with the drug gangs and downplays the issue of violence.
“Some people say Chiapas is in a lot of trouble, but I disagree. The problem is here in this area, and we are going to fix it,” the president said during a press conference in Tapachula, Chiapas.
The killings on Thursday showed that there has been a lot of violence leading up to the July 2 elections in Mexico. About 20 candidates have been killed so far in 2024.
On Friday, the old ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party said that two of the five dismembered bodies found on a street in Acapulco belonged to a candidate for a town council seat in the nearby town of Coyuca de Benitez and his wife.
“We want fairness for this terrible crime,” the group said about the killing of Anibal Zuniga and his wife, Rubi Bravo.
Once again, Lopez Obrador tried to make the violence seem less important and said that people who talk about the killings are just trying to make his government look bad.
“Thankfully, there have been fewer attacks than in previous elections, but there is a lot of sensationalism nowadays. It’s really sad that there are people trying to make money from the deaths and suffering of others,” he said. “This is a time when predators are taking advantage. “
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