--- title: "Silver or Lead: How Cartels Capture Mexican Elections" description: "Mexico's 2024 elections were historic in more ways than one. On the surface, they delivered a landmark: the election of the country's first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and a supermajority for her Morena party. That result firmly established Morena as the dominant political force in the country, capping six years in power that began under the previous administration of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. For a nation whose modern democracy is still young, the smashing of that particular glass ceiling was the kind of milestone that would, in almost any other context, define the entire story.\n\nBut Sheinbaum's victory was not the only thing that made 2024 historic. Running alongside the campaign was an unprecedented wave of assassination attempts and targeted attacks on political candidates across the country. Over the past two decades, violence aimed at Mexican elections has climbed steadily, driven not by ideological fervor but by a tangle of geopolitical and economic forces that make such violence useful to those who deploy it. The targets are rarely chosen for what they believe. They are chosen for what they threaten or protect.\n\nThose who carry out these attacks are, overwhelmingly, connected to the competition between criminal cartels. To understand the bloodshed surrounding the 2024 cycle is to understand a power structure that sits beneath, and sometimes above, the formal institutions of the Mexican state. It is a story of how organized crime wove itself into governance over a century, what happened when the old arrangements collapsed, and why local officials in particular now pay for that collapse with their lives.\n\nThis is an account of how cartels capture elections in Mexico, who ends up in the crosshairs, and what the pattern reveals about who really holds power.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The 2024 Mexican election cycle recorded over 330 incidents of violence against political figures, with at least 95 incidents producing one or more deaths, making it the third consecutive cycle to set a grim new record.\n- More than 500 local candidates requested state protection, and thousands withdrew their candidacies; 935 candidates pulled out across Chiapas and Michoacan alone, according to the National Electoral Institute.\n- Cartel violence against politicians is strategic, not random; it spikes where multiple cartels compete for territory and barely registers in regions a single cartel already dominates.\n- The roots run deep: under 71 years of one-party PRI rule, the \"Plaza System\" institutionalized cartels as quiet partners of the state, an arrangement that frayed when that monopoly on power ended in 2000.\n- President Felipe Calderon's militarized \"war on cartels,\" launched in 2006, fragmented criminal groups rather than ending them, and political assassinations jumped from 12 under his predecessor to 85 during his term.\n- Mayors bear the heaviest toll: of nearly 500 political assassinations between 2000 and 2021, 273 were incumbent mayors, former mayors, or mayoral candidates.\n- The 2025 judicial elections avoided the bloodshed many feared, but with 13% turnout and every Supreme Court seat going to candidates tied to Morena, fears are growing that a new single-party era may be emerging.\n\n## A Bloody Cycle\n\nLook closely at the 2024 election cycle and the numbers are staggering. According to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, known as ACLED, there were more than 330 incidents of violence targeting political figures. At least 95 of those incidents led to one or more reported deaths. These are not abstractions. Each figure represents a campaign rally that turned into a crime scene, a candidate's family forced into hiding, or a local official who never returned home.\n\nThe recorded violence, however, is only part of the picture. Acts of violence are often preceded by the threat of violence, and while a personal threat alone cannot \"take out\" a candidate, it can go a long way toward taking that candidate off the ballot. Intimidation works precisely because it does not need to be carried out to be effective. The mere credibility of a threat can hollow out a race before a single vote is cast.\n\nThat is exactly what happened in 2024. More than 500 local candidates requested state protection, and thousands more withdrew their names from the ballots entirely. According to the Mexican National Electoral Institute, known by its Spanish initials INE, 935 candidates withdrew their candidacies across the states of Chiapas and Michoacan alone. Whole slates of local democracy simply evaporated under pressure.\n\nWhat makes the pattern alarming is its persistence. The 2024 cycle did not merely set a new record for targeted violent events; it was the third election in a row to do so. A dangerous trajectory has clearly taken hold, one that compounds with each cycle rather than correcting itself.\n\nIt is tempting, when organized crime is involved, to oversimplify the motives. We reduce them to something like \"drug dealer equals violent,\" or we write off a place as somewhere that has simply always been dangerous. Both assumptions are wrong. The major Mexican cartels do not inflict violence at random. Their territorial control shifts constantly with the demands of the black market, and their decisions about whom to threaten or kill are calculated. The violence has a logic, and understanding that logic is the only way to make sense of who gets targeted and why.\n\n## The Cartel as Corporation\n\nIt helps to grasp the sheer scale of these organizations. The major Mexican cartels are not gangs in the colloquial sense. They are highly complex enterprises that, by some estimates, collectively employ more than 175,000 people across the country. If that figure is accurate, it would make organized crime the fifth-largest employer in Mexico, a workforce on par with a major national corporation or a sizable arm of the state itself.\n\nLike any large organization, the cartels have an obvious interest in making sure politicians legislate in their favor. The instinct is no different from that of any powerful industry seeking a friendly regulatory environment. What differs is the method. In the United States, an interest group with that kind of agenda might hire a polished lobbying team and pour millions into a super PAC. The transaction is legal, public, and conducted through paperwork and campaign finance.\n\nIn Mexico, the involvement is far more direct. Influence is not purchased through registered lobbyists but through a blunt menu of options that runs from cash to coercion. To understand why the relationship takes this form, you have to understand the black-market geopolitics that shape how these organizations behave, because their violence is a downstream effect of where their money comes from and who stands in its way.\n\n## Narco Geopolitics: The Map of Violence\n\nPolitical violence is a national problem in Mexico, but it is not spread evenly. The hotspots cluster in regions where cartels are actively competing for territory or for resources they can exploit through their black-market industries. Where competition is fierce, the violence follows. Where it is settled, the guns stay quiet.\n\nThe data bears this out in a way that is, at first, counterintuitive. Certain states, such as Durango and Yucatan, see little to no political violence. Others, like Chiapas and Guerrero, recorded over 40 incidents each in the 2024 cycle alone. Stranger still, states like Sinaloa and Jalisco rank among the top ten for overall gang violence yet fall outside the top ten for political violence specifically.\n\nThe explanation lies in market structure. Sinaloa and Jalisco are the established strongholds of the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by its Spanish initials CJNG. Because these groups are so consolidated at home, with little competition from rivals, there is simply less need to influence politicians against an enemy. They have already bought off whomever they need to buy off. Where one cartel reigns unchallenged, the political order is settled and the violence is comparatively low.\n\nThe opposite holds in geostrategically important states where no single cartel maintains hegemonic control. There, the calculus changes entirely, and the contest for political influence turns deadly.\n\n## Chiapas: The Southern Gateway\n\nConsider the southern state of Chiapas, which shares a land border with Guatemala and, by extension, with Central and South America more broadly. In the ACLED data from the 2024 cycle, Chiapas ranked only 12th in total occurrences of gang violence but ranked first in total events targeting political figures. Political violence there increased 90% from the 2021 cycle. The state became, in effect, the front line of the contest over who governs.\n\nThe reason is geographic and economic. Chiapas became a particularly important hub for the cartels in recent years, serving not only as a land corridor for drug trafficking but also for migrant smuggling. As the migrant crisis across South and Central America grew in the early 2020s, so did the opportunities for groups like the CJNG and the Sinaloa cartel to exploit desperate people for profit. The flow of human beings through the state became a revenue stream worth fighting over.\n\nThat made political decision-makers along the border extremely valuable friends for the cartels to cultivate. A cooperative local official could ease the movement of drugs and people; an uncooperative one could obstruct it. When officials refuse to play ball, or worse, align themselves with a rival, violence and intimidation become live options. The climate grew so menacing during the 2024 campaign that even Claudia Sheinbaum, the leading presidential candidate from the ruling party, was stopped by masked men at a makeshift checkpoint while driving through the state. If the eventual president of Mexico could be halted at gunpoint on a Chiapas road, the message to every lesser candidate was unmistakable.\n\n## Guerrero and the Fentanyl Frontier\n\nChiapas was not alone in its bloodshed. Guerrero was a hotspot for political violence in 2024, ranking first in total fatalities of political figures. Unlike Chiapas, Guerrero also carries high levels of cartel violence in general, ranking third overall in estimated gang violence events. It is a state where the general lawlessness and the targeted political killing reinforce one another.\n\nWhat makes Guerrero so contested is its port city of Acapulco, a hub for the import of industrially produced fentanyl precursor chemicals, most of them originating in China. These chemicals are the raw material for one of the most lucrative and lethal trades in the modern drug economy. Whoever controls their movement controls enormous wealth, and so the cartels in Guerrero compete fiercely, not only for influence over the port itself but for control of the overland smuggling routes that carry the precursors to drug labs further inland.\n\nThe import of these chemicals is heavily regulated by the Mexican government, largely at the behest of the United States, which has pressed hard to choke off the fentanyl supply chain. But regulation only raises the value of evading it. If a criminal organization can exert influence over local law enforcement or port officials through political control, business booms. The tighter the legal screws, the greater the premium on a corrupted official willing to look away.\n\nCrucially, the violence in Acapulco is not a duel between two giants. It is estimated that no fewer than six armed groups are fighting for control of trafficking activities in the city alone. That crowded field of competitors is precisely what makes the place so violent, because each group has both the motive and the means to eliminate rivals and the officials who might favor them.\n\n## No One Is Safe\n\nThis fierce, multi-sided competition translated directly into widespread violence against political candidates in 2024. From the outset of the cycle, it was clear that no one was safe, regardless of stature or protection. The contest was not confined to obscure local races; it reached candidates with national party backing and personal security details.\n\nOne of the most high-profile assassinations in Acapulco was that of Ricardo Taja, the leading mayoral candidate for the Morena party, the same ruling party that would go on to win the presidency. Taja was gunned down as he ate dinner in a restaurant, in the company of his bodyguard. The presence of security did nothing to save him. The killing was public, deliberate, and brazen.\n\nThat brazenness is itself a kind of statement. When cartels feel comfortable carrying out such public acts of violence and intimidation against politically connected individuals like Taja, or even halting a future president at a checkpoint, it offers a chilling insight into who they believe is really running the show. The audacity is the point. It signals that, in certain places, the formal authority of the state has been quietly subordinated to the authority of those who can kill without consequence.\n\nHow did Mexico arrive at this point? How did the cartels become so entrenched in society, and what specifically drove the exponential rise in political violence over the last two decades? The answer requires going back roughly a century.\n\n## Humble Beginnings: A Century of Trafficking\n\nDrug trafficking and cultivation have been present in Mexico for over 100 years, roughly coinciding with the early days of drug and alcohol prohibition in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s. American prohibition created demand, and Mexico's geography supplied a ready route to meet it. Some regions, such as Sinaloa, can trace their trafficking history back to Chinese immigrants who cultivated opium and transported it to the US through the relatively porous border of the era.\n\nIn those early years, drugs like opium and marijuana were relatively unregulated by the Mexican governments of the day. This was partly a matter of priorities. The country was reeling from its decade-long revolutionary war, which convulsed Mexico from 1910 to 1920 and left little institutional capacity to police a fledgling drug trade. Survival and reconstruction came first.\n\nBy the time national politics stabilized in the late 1920s, Mexico had come to be governed, in effect, as a single-party state under the National Revolutionary Party, known today as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI for short. The PRI would ultimately govern for 71 straight years, from 1929 to 2000. It was during this long reign that the organizations that would one day become modern cartels began weaving themselves into the fabric of Mexican politics and governance, growing up alongside the very state that was supposed to contain them.\n\n## The Plaza System\n\nThe narco-corruption of the early PRI years was, in a sense, ordinary. A few regulatory ministers paid off here, a state governor there. The cartels themselves were nowhere near the levels of militarization and bureaucratic organization that define their modern successors. They were criminal businesses, not paramilitary empires.\n\nThat changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when corruption between the government and the cartels began operating on a truly national scale. During this period, cartels became institutionalized players within the power structure of Mexico. The arrangement that emerged became known as the \"Plaza System,\" an unwritten understanding between the most powerful figures in the drug trade and state agencies. It allowed the cartels to run their operations in designated regions, and it effectively shaped daily life in PRI-era Mexico.\n\nThe bargain was simple. So long as the cartels limited violence against civilians and slid something under the table to PRI party members, they were granted broad discretion to carry out their illicit activities. The plaza regions, such as Guadalajara, functioned essentially as mini narco-states, where civilians were often subject to the rule of cartel law rather than constitutional law. The most powerful organizations, like the infamous Guadalajara Cartel, also enjoyed close ties with corrupt state intelligence agencies such as the Direccion Federal de Seguridad, or DFS. The DFS would pursue minor-league rivals in the drug trade and even throw American and Mexican counter-narcotics authorities off the scent of the major players. The state did not merely tolerate the biggest cartels; it actively shielded them.\n\n## A Deal With the Devil\n\nA former PRI official might defend this era by pointing to its results. The years of the Plaza System coincided with significant economic growth and relatively low levels of violent crime. Indeed, the period between 1940 and 1970 is sometimes called the \"Mexican Miracle\" or, more cynically, \"The Perfect Dictatorship,\" a reference to the high levels of industrialization and economic growth achieved under PRI rule. By certain measures, the country prospered.\n\nAnd that may well be true. But the argument that the ends justify the means only holds if those ends are permanent. The stability was conditional, and the condition was the survival of the system that produced it.\n\nIt can be reasonably argued that, in striking this bargain and turning the cartels into institutions, the Mexican state created a dangerous dependency. The criminal organizations became addicted to the benefits that flow from regulatory and political cooperation: protected territory, predictable rules, and the quiet backing of the agencies meant to police them. The arrangement worked beautifully right up until it did not. And the obvious question hangs over everything that followed. What happens when an addict is suddenly forced to go cold turkey? The likeliest answer is that it lashes out to get its fix.\n\n## The Shake Up\n\nWhatever stability the Plaza System and single-party rule provided, it could only last as long as that single party held power. And as often happens with single-party states, the endemic corruption that defined PRI rule eventually caused the whole system of governance to buckle under its own weight.\n\nThe crisis arrived in August 1982, when Mexico announced it could no longer service its external debt of roughly $80 billion. By the standards of today's vast government deficits, that figure can look almost modest. But in the less globalized, less financialized world of 1982, it was a catastrophe for a single-party state burdened with a sprawling portfolio of state-run industries. The government negotiated with the International Monetary Fund and its creditors, accepting bailout loans under strict conditions through the Baker Plan in 1985 and the Brady Plan in 1989. In broad terms, these measures pushed free-market and democratizing reforms that ultimately stripped the PRI of its status as the political and economic power center of Mexico.\n\nThe full story of that collapse is far more complex than the state's relationship to organized crime and would require its own telling. But for understanding the political violence of 2024, the key point is this: the Mexican cartels came into being under a single-party state that not only tolerated their illegal activities but, in some cases, helped facilitate them. When you remove the stability such a system provides, anarchy and violence begin to become the rule rather than the exception.\n\nThe true turning point came in 2000, with the victory of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, or PAN, in that year's presidential election. The shift in political power disrupted long-standing ties between local and federal authorities across the country, and in doing so it severed the longstanding ties between the cartels and the federal government. The result was a change in cartel tactics, from bribery to coercive violence. Even so, the overall homicide rate remained relatively low at first. During Fox's term, there were only 12 recorded political assassinations, according to an academic dataset called PAIAMEX.\n\n## The War That Made Things Worse\n\nThe real escalation followed the 2006 election of President Felipe Calderon. Seeking to build popular support among the electorate, Calderon declared war on the cartels across Mexico, pouring billions of dollars into the militarization of the federal security agencies. On paper, it was a bold confrontation with violent criminal enterprises. His campaign saw the arrest or killing of at least 25 drug lords and 160 lieutenants during his six-year term.\n\nTaken at face value, that might sound like progress. Rooting out the leadership of violent criminal enterprises is not, in itself, an unethical goal. But ethical intentions did not translate into good outcomes for Mexico. The cartels had become deeply entrenched not just as individual organizations but as key sectors of the local economy in certain regions. Eliminating a single boss or lieutenant did nothing to dismantle the organizational structures beneath him. And even when a cartel was destroyed in name, a new organization could rise to take its place, as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel later did.\n\nRather than reducing cartel-related violence, this strategy of leadership decapitation triggered fierce competition among opportunistic lieutenants vying for control in the absence of their bosses. For Mexican authorities, it was like fighting a hydra on steroids. For every head they cut off, roughly a dozen others emerged, and the new heads tended to be even more bloodthirsty than the originals. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, the homicide rate in Mexico nearly tripled during Calderon's presidency, rising from about 8 per 100,000 in 2007 to over 22 per 100,000 by 2010. Notably, areas with close elections that broke in favor of PAN candidates saw the largest increases in violence. And according to the PAIAMEX dataset, political assassinations climbed from 12 under Fox to 85 during Calderon's term between 2006 and 2012. It was during these years that a disturbing sub-trend began to emerge.\n\n## Dying to Be the Mayor\n\nOf the nearly 500 political assassinations recorded between 2000 and 2021, 273 were incumbent mayors, former mayors, or candidates for mayor. The office of mayor, far from the loftiest rung of Mexican politics, had become its most lethal. Two main factors appear to drive this.\n\nThe first, and most obvious, is retaliation against law enforcement. Criminal organizations dislike being prosecuted, and in a federal system like Mexico's, it is often the mayors and local municipal authorities who direct whom local police pursue. Imagine you lead a local cartel contingent and no longer enjoy the protection of the old Plaza System, when a mayoral candidate emerges promising to crack down on cartel activity in your town. It may well serve your interests to remove that candidate, especially if a rival contender might be persuaded to cooperate instead, for a fee. Some tough-on-crime candidates survive their elections unscathed, but the cartels show no hesitation in striking at sitting mayors. Of those 273 mayoral assassinations, 99 of the victims were incumbents at the time of their deaths. For mayoral candidates and incumbents alike, violence is treated by the cartels as an effective and acceptable tool for handling would-be reformers.\n\nNot every politician, of course, comes to the job from a place of altruism. Many mayors in cartel hotspots are notoriously corrupt, yet corruption guarantees no one's safety. That points to the second factor: competition between rival cartel groups for influence. During the Plaza era, the major players profited from their relationships with a single, stable state, to the disadvantage of smaller operations. But in a fractious political landscape where multiple parties contend for power, there is no longer one source of authority, like the PRI, with which to cut a single deal. So the cartels pursue influence through lower-level bribery, targeting a mayor or mayoral candidate rather than a senator, governor, or president. Where multiple cartels vie for control, different groups bribe different candidates. If a cartel believes a rival-aligned candidate is likely to win, or that an incumbent has fallen under a rival's sway, it will not hesitate to act.\n\nEven leaving office offers no escape. The largest single category of mayoral assassinations in the PAIAMEX dataset was former mayors, at 146 killings between 2000 and 2021. This likely reflects a mix of motives. A former mayor might decide to speak out against the corruption witnessed in office, or might have participated in that corruption, leaving the cartels involved eager to tie off loose ends. Whatever stage of the mayoral life cycle one occupies, being a mayor in a cartel-influenced region of Mexico is a profoundly unsafe line of work.\n\n## The 2025 Judicial Elections\n\nAfter such grim statistics, one might brace for the worst from the judicial elections held in June 2025, a first in Mexican history. For the first time, voters elected judges directly, and many observers feared that putting figures who play an obvious role in the criminal justice system on the ballot would invite the same political violence that scarred earlier cycles. Remarkably, the violence of the 2024 general election did not materialize.\n\nThe only high-profile assassinations during the cycle were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mayoral candidates in the state of Veracruz, which was also holding municipal elections. The contrast points to something important about cartel calculation. While judges deliver verdicts, they do not deliver indictments or direct law enforcement. That power belongs to public prosecutors and mayors. The cartels are inherently violent, but they do not inflict violence for no reason, and a judge offered less immediate leverage to threaten or protect than a mayor does. It may simply be that no one yet knows how the elected judiciary will affect the criminal justice system. Perhaps the next round of judicial elections, in 2027, will look different once the impact of activist judges over the intervening two years becomes clear.\n\nThat restraint should not be mistaken for a clean democratic triumph. According to The Economist, at least 16 candidates with known cartel ties still managed to get on the ballot. And the results themselves invite unease. With only 13% voter turnout, President Sheinbaum's Morena party benefited enormously. Although the elections were technically non-partisan, all nine seats on the Mexican Supreme Court were won by candidates with ties to Morena.\n\nThis has fueled fears within Mexico that Morena is beginning to resemble the PRI of old. The question is whether the country is watching the return of the \"perfect dictatorship\" under a different banner, and whether such a situation might actually suit the cartels. The largest organizations may well long for the days of single-party rule, when corrupting the government meant little more than finding the right official to pay. Such a system might prove less violent. It could also mean the death of Mexican democracy as it now exists. Only time will tell whether Mexican history is about to repeat, rhyme, or do something else entirely.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n**How much political violence occurred during Mexico's 2024 election cycle?**\nAccording to ACLED data, there were more than 330 incidents of violence targeting political figures during the cycle, and at least 95 of those incidents resulted in one or more reported deaths. Beyond the killings, more than 500 local candidates requested state protection and thousands withdrew from their races, with 935 candidates pulling out across Chiapas and Michoacan alone. It was the third consecutive election cycle to set a new record for targeted violent events.\n\n**Why is cartel violence concentrated in some states but not others?**\nThe violence tracks competition. In states like Sinaloa and Jalisco, single cartels, the Sinaloa cartel and the CJNG, dominate so completely that there is little need to fight over political influence, so political violence is comparatively low despite high overall gang violence. In contested, geostrategically valuable states like Chiapas and Guerrero, where no single group holds sway, rival cartels battle for control of trafficking routes and the officials who oversee them, driving political violence sharply upward.\n\n**What is the Plaza System?**\nThe Plaza System was an unwritten arrangement that took shape under PRI rule, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s onward. It allowed the most powerful drug traffickers to operate in designated regions in exchange for limiting violence against civilians and paying off PRI officials. Plaza regions such as Guadalajara effectively functioned as mini narco-states governed by cartel law, and the largest cartels even received protection from corrupt state intelligence agencies like the Direccion Federal de Seguridad.\n\n**How did the end of one-party rule change cartel behavior?**\nFor 71 years the PRI offered the cartels a single, stable partner to bribe. When Vicente Fox of the PAN won the presidency in 2000, the long-standing ties between cartels and the federal government were severed, and criminal groups shifted from bribery toward coercive violence. The fragmentation of political power meant there was no longer one center of authority to negotiate with, so cartels turned to influencing and intimidating local officials instead.\n\n**Why did Calderon's war on the cartels increase violence?**\nPresident Felipe Calderon's militarized campaign, launched in 2006, arrested or killed at least 25 drug lords and 160 lieutenants. But removing leaders did not dismantle the organizations beneath them. Instead it sparked fierce competition among opportunistic lieutenants and rival groups. The homicide rate nearly tripled during his presidency, from about 8 per 100,000 in 2007 to over 22 per 100,000 by 2010, and recorded political assassinations rose from 12 under Fox to 85 under Calderon.\n\n**Why are mayors targeted more than other politicians?**\nMayors and local municipal authorities direct whom local police pursue, making them both a threat to cartels and a prize worth controlling. Cartels target candidates who promise crackdowns, sitting mayors who resist, and even former mayors who might expose past corruption. Of nearly 500 political assassinations between 2000 and 2021, 273 involved mayors at some stage; 99 were sitting incumbents and 146 were former mayors.\n\n**Were the 2025 judicial elections as violent as feared?**\nNo. Despite widespread concern, the bloodshed of 2024 did not recur. The only high-profile assassinations involved mayoral candidates in Veracruz, which was simultaneously holding municipal elections. Analysts suggest judges were spared because they deliver verdicts rather than indictments or law enforcement actions, offering cartels less direct leverage. Still, at least 16 candidates with known cartel ties reached the ballot, and with 13% turnout every Supreme Court seat went to candidates tied to Morena.\n\n## Sources\n\n- ACLED, \"Elections Under Capture: Criminal Wars and the Targeting of Political Figures in Guanajuato, Guerrero, and Michoacan\"\n- \"Five key takeaways from the 2024 elections in Mexico\"\n- \"935 candidates withdraw from their political aspirations\"\n- \"Political violence casts a shadow over the start of the 2024 electoral process\"\n- \"Causes and electoral consequences of political assassinations: The role of organized crime in Mexico\"\n- \"Drug cartels are Mexico's fifth largest employer with 175,000 on payroll, study finds,\" The Independent\n- \"The Fentanyl Trade Through Mexico, Explained in 8 Graphs\"\n- \"Mexico's ruling party, Morena, has captured the judiciary\"\n- \"A History of Opium Commodity Chains in Mexico, 1900-1950,\" Journal of Illicit Economies and Development\n- \"The Road to the Judicial Elections in Mexico,\" WOLA\n- \"Mexican Drug Trade: How the Trafficking Problem First Began,\" TIME\n- \"Reducing cartel recruitment is the only way to lower violence in Mexico,\" Science\n- \"Life on the Margins in a Kingdom of Cartels,\" Literary Hub\n- \"Double Injustice: How Mexico's Criminal Justice System Fails Victims and the Accused in Homicide Investigations,\" Human Rights Watch\n- \"Migration in Chiapas: Crime, Impunity and Death,\" Contra Corriente\n- \"Crisis, corruption and state-led development in the making of the Mexican drug trade,\" Past & Present, Oxford Academic\n- \"Mexican Drug War 2006-2012,\" EBSCO Research Starters\n- \"Mexico election 2024: Country suffers its most violent election campaign\"\n- \"Mexico's land and elections feuds threaten political figures in Oaxaca and Chiapas\"\n- \"Politicians in the Crosshairs of Mexico's Criminal Wars: The Cases of Guanajuato, Guerrero, and Michoacan\"\n- \"Mexico's External Debt Policies, 1982-90\"\n\n" url: https://homefronts.pub/article/silver-or-lead-how-cartels-capture-mexican-elections.md canonical: https://homefronts.pub/article/silver-or-lead-how-cartels-capture-mexican-elections datePublished: 2026-06-03 dateModified: 2026-06-03 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://homefronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: HomeFronts image: "https://media.homefronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/I5PDs26EkB0/hero.jpg" type: Article contentHash: 41f99aaa34e7298508fbf8b1da9950888d16ec8063cde0e50195f5c2f646f611 tokens: 8223 summaryUrl: https://homefronts.pub/article/silver-or-lead-how-cartels-capture-mexican-elections.md.summary.md --- Mexico's 2024 elections were historic in more ways than one. On the surface, they delivered a landmark: the election of the country's first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and a supermajority for her Morena party. That result firmly established Morena as the dominant political force in the country, capping six years in power that began under the previous administration of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. For a nation whose modern democracy is still young, the smashing of that particular glass ceiling was the kind of milestone that would, in almost any other context, define the entire story. But Sheinbaum's victory was not the only thing that made 2024 historic. Running alongside the campaign was an unprecedented wave of assassination attempts and targeted attacks on political candidates across the country. Over the past two decades, violence aimed at Mexican elections has climbed steadily, driven not by ideological fervor but by a tangle of geopolitical and economic forces that make such violence useful to those who deploy it. The targets are rarely chosen for what they believe. They are chosen for what they threaten or protect. Those who carry out these attacks are, overwhelmingly, connected to the competition between criminal cartels. To understand the bloodshed surrounding the 2024 cycle is to understand a power structure that sits beneath, and sometimes above, the formal institutions of the Mexican state. It is a story of how organized crime wove itself into governance over a century, what happened when the old arrangements collapsed, and why local officials in particular now pay for that collapse with their lives. This is an account of how cartels capture elections in Mexico, who ends up in the crosshairs, and what the pattern reveals about who really holds power. ## Key Takeaways - The 2024 Mexican election cycle recorded over 330 incidents of violence against political figures, with at least 95 incidents producing one or more deaths, making it the third consecutive cycle to set a grim new record. - More than 500 local candidates requested state protection, and thousands withdrew their candidacies; 935 candidates pulled out across Chiapas and Michoacan alone, according to the National Electoral Institute. - Cartel violence against politicians is strategic, not random; it spikes where multiple cartels compete for territory and barely registers in regions a single cartel already dominates. - The roots run deep: under 71 years of one-party PRI rule, the "Plaza System" institutionalized cartels as quiet partners of the state, an arrangement that frayed when that monopoly on power ended in 2000. - President Felipe Calderon's militarized "war on cartels," launched in 2006, fragmented criminal groups rather than ending them, and political assassinations jumped from 12 under his predecessor to 85 during his term. - Mayors bear the heaviest toll: of nearly 500 political assassinations between 2000 and 2021, 273 were incumbent mayors, former mayors, or mayoral candidates. - The 2025 judicial elections avoided the bloodshed many feared, but with 13% turnout and every Supreme Court seat going to candidates tied to Morena, fears are growing that a new single-party era may be emerging. ## A Bloody Cycle Look closely at the 2024 election cycle and the numbers are staggering. According to data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, known as ACLED, there were more than 330 incidents of violence targeting political figures. At least 95 of those incidents led to one or more reported deaths. These are not abstractions. Each figure represents a campaign rally that turned into a crime scene, a candidate's family forced into hiding, or a local official who never returned home. The recorded violence, however, is only part of the picture. Acts of violence are often preceded by the threat of violence, and while a personal threat alone cannot "take out" a candidate, it can go a long way toward taking that candidate off the ballot. Intimidation works precisely because it does not need to be carried out to be effective. The mere credibility of a threat can hollow out a race before a single vote is cast. That is exactly what happened in 2024. More than 500 local candidates requested state protection, and thousands more withdrew their names from the ballots entirely. According to the Mexican National Electoral Institute, known by its Spanish initials INE, 935 candidates withdrew their candidacies across the states of Chiapas and Michoacan alone. Whole slates of local democracy simply evaporated under pressure. What makes the pattern alarming is its persistence. The 2024 cycle did not merely set a new record for targeted violent events; it was the third election in a row to do so. A dangerous trajectory has clearly taken hold, one that compounds with each cycle rather than correcting itself. It is tempting, when organized crime is involved, to oversimplify the motives. We reduce them to something like "drug dealer equals violent," or we write off a place as somewhere that has simply always been dangerous. Both assumptions are wrong. The major Mexican cartels do not inflict violence at random. Their territorial control shifts constantly with the demands of the black market, and their decisions about whom to threaten or kill are calculated. The violence has a logic, and understanding that logic is the only way to make sense of who gets targeted and why. ## The Cartel as Corporation It helps to grasp the sheer scale of these organizations. The major Mexican cartels are not gangs in the colloquial sense. They are highly complex enterprises that, by some estimates, collectively employ more than 175,000 people across the country. If that figure is accurate, it would make organized crime the fifth-largest employer in Mexico, a workforce on par with a major national corporation or a sizable arm of the state itself. Like any large organization, the cartels have an obvious interest in making sure politicians legislate in their favor. The instinct is no different from that of any powerful industry seeking a friendly regulatory environment. What differs is the method. In the United States, an interest group with that kind of agenda might hire a polished lobbying team and pour millions into a super PAC. The transaction is legal, public, and conducted through paperwork and campaign finance. In Mexico, the involvement is far more direct. Influence is not purchased through registered lobbyists but through a blunt menu of options that runs from cash to coercion. To understand why the relationship takes this form, you have to understand the black-market geopolitics that shape how these organizations behave, because their violence is a downstream effect of where their money comes from and who stands in its way. ## Narco Geopolitics: The Map of Violence Political violence is a national problem in Mexico, but it is not spread evenly. The hotspots cluster in regions where cartels are actively competing for territory or for resources they can exploit through their black-market industries. Where competition is fierce, the violence follows. Where it is settled, the guns stay quiet. The data bears this out in a way that is, at first, counterintuitive. Certain states, such as Durango and Yucatan, see little to no political violence. Others, like Chiapas and Guerrero, recorded over 40 incidents each in the 2024 cycle alone. Stranger still, states like Sinaloa and Jalisco rank among the top ten for overall gang violence yet fall outside the top ten for political violence specifically. The explanation lies in market structure. Sinaloa and Jalisco are the established strongholds of the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by its Spanish initials CJNG. Because these groups are so consolidated at home, with little competition from rivals, there is simply less need to influence politicians against an enemy. They have already bought off whomever they need to buy off. Where one cartel reigns unchallenged, the political order is settled and the violence is comparatively low. The opposite holds in geostrategically important states where no single cartel maintains hegemonic control. There, the calculus changes entirely, and the contest for political influence turns deadly. ## Chiapas: The Southern Gateway Consider the southern state of Chiapas, which shares a land border with Guatemala and, by extension, with Central and South America more broadly. In the ACLED data from the 2024 cycle, Chiapas ranked only 12th in total occurrences of gang violence but ranked first in total events targeting political figures. Political violence there increased 90% from the 2021 cycle. The state became, in effect, the front line of the contest over who governs. The reason is geographic and economic. Chiapas became a particularly important hub for the cartels in recent years, serving not only as a land corridor for drug trafficking but also for migrant smuggling. As the migrant crisis across South and Central America grew in the early 2020s, so did the opportunities for groups like the CJNG and the Sinaloa cartel to exploit desperate people for profit. The flow of human beings through the state became a revenue stream worth fighting over. That made political decision-makers along the border extremely valuable friends for the cartels to cultivate. A cooperative local official could ease the movement of drugs and people; an uncooperative one could obstruct it. When officials refuse to play ball, or worse, align themselves with a rival, violence and intimidation become live options. The climate grew so menacing during the 2024 campaign that even Claudia Sheinbaum, the leading presidential candidate from the ruling party, was stopped by masked men at a makeshift checkpoint while driving through the state. If the eventual president of Mexico could be halted at gunpoint on a Chiapas road, the message to every lesser candidate was unmistakable. ## Guerrero and the Fentanyl Frontier Chiapas was not alone in its bloodshed. Guerrero was a hotspot for political violence in 2024, ranking first in total fatalities of political figures. Unlike Chiapas, Guerrero also carries high levels of cartel violence in general, ranking third overall in estimated gang violence events. It is a state where the general lawlessness and the targeted political killing reinforce one another. What makes Guerrero so contested is its port city of Acapulco, a hub for the import of industrially produced fentanyl precursor chemicals, most of them originating in China. These chemicals are the raw material for one of the most lucrative and lethal trades in the modern drug economy. Whoever controls their movement controls enormous wealth, and so the cartels in Guerrero compete fiercely, not only for influence over the port itself but for control of the overland smuggling routes that carry the precursors to drug labs further inland. The import of these chemicals is heavily regulated by the Mexican government, largely at the behest of the United States, which has pressed hard to choke off the fentanyl supply chain. But regulation only raises the value of evading it. If a criminal organization can exert influence over local law enforcement or port officials through political control, business booms. The tighter the legal screws, the greater the premium on a corrupted official willing to look away. Crucially, the violence in Acapulco is not a duel between two giants. It is estimated that no fewer than six armed groups are fighting for control of trafficking activities in the city alone. That crowded field of competitors is precisely what makes the place so violent, because each group has both the motive and the means to eliminate rivals and the officials who might favor them. ## No One Is Safe This fierce, multi-sided competition translated directly into widespread violence against political candidates in 2024. From the outset of the cycle, it was clear that no one was safe, regardless of stature or protection. The contest was not confined to obscure local races; it reached candidates with national party backing and personal security details. One of the most high-profile assassinations in Acapulco was that of Ricardo Taja, the leading mayoral candidate for the Morena party, the same ruling party that would go on to win the presidency. Taja was gunned down as he ate dinner in a restaurant, in the company of his bodyguard. The presence of security did nothing to save him. The killing was public, deliberate, and brazen. That brazenness is itself a kind of statement. When cartels feel comfortable carrying out such public acts of violence and intimidation against politically connected individuals like Taja, or even halting a future president at a checkpoint, it offers a chilling insight into who they believe is really running the show. The audacity is the point. It signals that, in certain places, the formal authority of the state has been quietly subordinated to the authority of those who can kill without consequence. How did Mexico arrive at this point? How did the cartels become so entrenched in society, and what specifically drove the exponential rise in political violence over the last two decades? The answer requires going back roughly a century. ## Humble Beginnings: A Century of Trafficking Drug trafficking and cultivation have been present in Mexico for over 100 years, roughly coinciding with the early days of drug and alcohol prohibition in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s. American prohibition created demand, and Mexico's geography supplied a ready route to meet it. Some regions, such as Sinaloa, can trace their trafficking history back to Chinese immigrants who cultivated opium and transported it to the US through the relatively porous border of the era. In those early years, drugs like opium and marijuana were relatively unregulated by the Mexican governments of the day. This was partly a matter of priorities. The country was reeling from its decade-long revolutionary war, which convulsed Mexico from 1910 to 1920 and left little institutional capacity to police a fledgling drug trade. Survival and reconstruction came first. By the time national politics stabilized in the late 1920s, Mexico had come to be governed, in effect, as a single-party state under the National Revolutionary Party, known today as the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI for short. The PRI would ultimately govern for 71 straight years, from 1929 to 2000. It was during this long reign that the organizations that would one day become modern cartels began weaving themselves into the fabric of Mexican politics and governance, growing up alongside the very state that was supposed to contain them. ## The Plaza System The narco-corruption of the early PRI years was, in a sense, ordinary. A few regulatory ministers paid off here, a state governor there. The cartels themselves were nowhere near the levels of militarization and bureaucratic organization that define their modern successors. They were criminal businesses, not paramilitary empires. That changed in the 1960s and 1970s, when corruption between the government and the cartels began operating on a truly national scale. During this period, cartels became institutionalized players within the power structure of Mexico. The arrangement that emerged became known as the "Plaza System," an unwritten understanding between the most powerful figures in the drug trade and state agencies. It allowed the cartels to run their operations in designated regions, and it effectively shaped daily life in PRI-era Mexico. The bargain was simple. So long as the cartels limited violence against civilians and slid something under the table to PRI party members, they were granted broad discretion to carry out their illicit activities. The plaza regions, such as Guadalajara, functioned essentially as mini narco-states, where civilians were often subject to the rule of cartel law rather than constitutional law. The most powerful organizations, like the infamous Guadalajara Cartel, also enjoyed close ties with corrupt state intelligence agencies such as the Direccion Federal de Seguridad, or DFS. The DFS would pursue minor-league rivals in the drug trade and even throw American and Mexican counter-narcotics authorities off the scent of the major players. The state did not merely tolerate the biggest cartels; it actively shielded them. ## A Deal With the Devil A former PRI official might defend this era by pointing to its results. The years of the Plaza System coincided with significant economic growth and relatively low levels of violent crime. Indeed, the period between 1940 and 1970 is sometimes called the "Mexican Miracle" or, more cynically, "The Perfect Dictatorship," a reference to the high levels of industrialization and economic growth achieved under PRI rule. By certain measures, the country prospered. And that may well be true. But the argument that the ends justify the means only holds if those ends are permanent. The stability was conditional, and the condition was the survival of the system that produced it. It can be reasonably argued that, in striking this bargain and turning the cartels into institutions, the Mexican state created a dangerous dependency. The criminal organizations became addicted to the benefits that flow from regulatory and political cooperation: protected territory, predictable rules, and the quiet backing of the agencies meant to police them. The arrangement worked beautifully right up until it did not. And the obvious question hangs over everything that followed. What happens when an addict is suddenly forced to go cold turkey? The likeliest answer is that it lashes out to get its fix. ## The Shake Up Whatever stability the Plaza System and single-party rule provided, it could only last as long as that single party held power. And as often happens with single-party states, the endemic corruption that defined PRI rule eventually caused the whole system of governance to buckle under its own weight. The crisis arrived in August 1982, when Mexico announced it could no longer service its external debt of roughly $80 billion. By the standards of today's vast government deficits, that figure can look almost modest. But in the less globalized, less financialized world of 1982, it was a catastrophe for a single-party state burdened with a sprawling portfolio of state-run industries. The government negotiated with the International Monetary Fund and its creditors, accepting bailout loans under strict conditions through the Baker Plan in 1985 and the Brady Plan in 1989. In broad terms, these measures pushed free-market and democratizing reforms that ultimately stripped the PRI of its status as the political and economic power center of Mexico. The full story of that collapse is far more complex than the state's relationship to organized crime and would require its own telling. But for understanding the political violence of 2024, the key point is this: the Mexican cartels came into being under a single-party state that not only tolerated their illegal activities but, in some cases, helped facilitate them. When you remove the stability such a system provides, anarchy and violence begin to become the rule rather than the exception. The true turning point came in 2000, with the victory of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, or PAN, in that year's presidential election. The shift in political power disrupted long-standing ties between local and federal authorities across the country, and in doing so it severed the longstanding ties between the cartels and the federal government. The result was a change in cartel tactics, from bribery to coercive violence. Even so, the overall homicide rate remained relatively low at first. During Fox's term, there were only 12 recorded political assassinations, according to an academic dataset called PAIAMEX. ## The War That Made Things Worse The real escalation followed the 2006 election of President Felipe Calderon. Seeking to build popular support among the electorate, Calderon declared war on the cartels across Mexico, pouring billions of dollars into the militarization of the federal security agencies. On paper, it was a bold confrontation with violent criminal enterprises. His campaign saw the arrest or killing of at least 25 drug lords and 160 lieutenants during his six-year term. Taken at face value, that might sound like progress. Rooting out the leadership of violent criminal enterprises is not, in itself, an unethical goal. But ethical intentions did not translate into good outcomes for Mexico. The cartels had become deeply entrenched not just as individual organizations but as key sectors of the local economy in certain regions. Eliminating a single boss or lieutenant did nothing to dismantle the organizational structures beneath him. And even when a cartel was destroyed in name, a new organization could rise to take its place, as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel later did. Rather than reducing cartel-related violence, this strategy of leadership decapitation triggered fierce competition among opportunistic lieutenants vying for control in the absence of their bosses. For Mexican authorities, it was like fighting a hydra on steroids. For every head they cut off, roughly a dozen others emerged, and the new heads tended to be even more bloodthirsty than the originals. According to a report from Human Rights Watch, the homicide rate in Mexico nearly tripled during Calderon's presidency, rising from about 8 per 100,000 in 2007 to over 22 per 100,000 by 2010. Notably, areas with close elections that broke in favor of PAN candidates saw the largest increases in violence. And according to the PAIAMEX dataset, political assassinations climbed from 12 under Fox to 85 during Calderon's term between 2006 and 2012. It was during these years that a disturbing sub-trend began to emerge. ## Dying to Be the Mayor Of the nearly 500 political assassinations recorded between 2000 and 2021, 273 were incumbent mayors, former mayors, or candidates for mayor. The office of mayor, far from the loftiest rung of Mexican politics, had become its most lethal. Two main factors appear to drive this. The first, and most obvious, is retaliation against law enforcement. Criminal organizations dislike being prosecuted, and in a federal system like Mexico's, it is often the mayors and local municipal authorities who direct whom local police pursue. Imagine you lead a local cartel contingent and no longer enjoy the protection of the old Plaza System, when a mayoral candidate emerges promising to crack down on cartel activity in your town. It may well serve your interests to remove that candidate, especially if a rival contender might be persuaded to cooperate instead, for a fee. Some tough-on-crime candidates survive their elections unscathed, but the cartels show no hesitation in striking at sitting mayors. Of those 273 mayoral assassinations, 99 of the victims were incumbents at the time of their deaths. For mayoral candidates and incumbents alike, violence is treated by the cartels as an effective and acceptable tool for handling would-be reformers. Not every politician, of course, comes to the job from a place of altruism. Many mayors in cartel hotspots are notoriously corrupt, yet corruption guarantees no one's safety. That points to the second factor: competition between rival cartel groups for influence. During the Plaza era, the major players profited from their relationships with a single, stable state, to the disadvantage of smaller operations. But in a fractious political landscape where multiple parties contend for power, there is no longer one source of authority, like the PRI, with which to cut a single deal. So the cartels pursue influence through lower-level bribery, targeting a mayor or mayoral candidate rather than a senator, governor, or president. Where multiple cartels vie for control, different groups bribe different candidates. If a cartel believes a rival-aligned candidate is likely to win, or that an incumbent has fallen under a rival's sway, it will not hesitate to act. Even leaving office offers no escape. The largest single category of mayoral assassinations in the PAIAMEX dataset was former mayors, at 146 killings between 2000 and 2021. This likely reflects a mix of motives. A former mayor might decide to speak out against the corruption witnessed in office, or might have participated in that corruption, leaving the cartels involved eager to tie off loose ends. Whatever stage of the mayoral life cycle one occupies, being a mayor in a cartel-influenced region of Mexico is a profoundly unsafe line of work. ## The 2025 Judicial Elections After such grim statistics, one might brace for the worst from the judicial elections held in June 2025, a first in Mexican history. For the first time, voters elected judges directly, and many observers feared that putting figures who play an obvious role in the criminal justice system on the ballot would invite the same political violence that scarred earlier cycles. Remarkably, the violence of the 2024 general election did not materialize. The only high-profile assassinations during the cycle were, perhaps unsurprisingly, mayoral candidates in the state of Veracruz, which was also holding municipal elections. The contrast points to something important about cartel calculation. While judges deliver verdicts, they do not deliver indictments or direct law enforcement. That power belongs to public prosecutors and mayors. The cartels are inherently violent, but they do not inflict violence for no reason, and a judge offered less immediate leverage to threaten or protect than a mayor does. It may simply be that no one yet knows how the elected judiciary will affect the criminal justice system. Perhaps the next round of judicial elections, in 2027, will look different once the impact of activist judges over the intervening two years becomes clear. That restraint should not be mistaken for a clean democratic triumph. According to The Economist, at least 16 candidates with known cartel ties still managed to get on the ballot. And the results themselves invite unease. With only 13% voter turnout, President Sheinbaum's Morena party benefited enormously. Although the elections were technically non-partisan, all nine seats on the Mexican Supreme Court were won by candidates with ties to Morena. This has fueled fears within Mexico that Morena is beginning to resemble the PRI of old. The question is whether the country is watching the return of the "perfect dictatorship" under a different banner, and whether such a situation might actually suit the cartels. The largest organizations may well long for the days of single-party rule, when corrupting the government meant little more than finding the right official to pay. Such a system might prove less violent. It could also mean the death of Mexican democracy as it now exists. Only time will tell whether Mexican history is about to repeat, rhyme, or do something else entirely. ## Frequently Asked Questions **How much political violence occurred during Mexico's 2024 election cycle?** According to ACLED data, there were more than 330 incidents of violence targeting political figures during the cycle, and at least 95 of those incidents resulted in one or more reported deaths. Beyond the killings, more than 500 local candidates requested state protection and thousands withdrew from their races, with 935 candidates pulling out across Chiapas and Michoacan alone. It was the third consecutive election cycle to set a new record for targeted violent events. **Why is cartel violence concentrated in some states but not others?** The violence tracks competition. In states like Sinaloa and Jalisco, single cartels, the Sinaloa cartel and the CJNG, dominate so completely that there is little need to fight over political influence, so political violence is comparatively low despite high overall gang violence. In contested, geostrategically valuable states like Chiapas and Guerrero, where no single group holds sway, rival cartels battle for control of trafficking routes and the officials who oversee them, driving political violence sharply upward. **What is the Plaza System?** The Plaza System was an unwritten arrangement that took shape under PRI rule, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s onward. It allowed the most powerful drug traffickers to operate in designated regions in exchange for limiting violence against civilians and paying off PRI officials. Plaza regions such as Guadalajara effectively functioned as mini narco-states governed by cartel law, and the largest cartels even received protection from corrupt state intelligence agencies like the Direccion Federal de Seguridad. **How did the end of one-party rule change cartel behavior?** For 71 years the PRI offered the cartels a single, stable partner to bribe. When Vicente Fox of the PAN won the presidency in 2000, the long-standing ties between cartels and the federal government were severed, and criminal groups shifted from bribery toward coercive violence. The fragmentation of political power meant there was no longer one center of authority to negotiate with, so cartels turned to influencing and intimidating local officials instead. **Why did Calderon's war on the cartels increase violence?** President Felipe Calderon's militarized campaign, launched in 2006, arrested or killed at least 25 drug lords and 160 lieutenants. But removing leaders did not dismantle the organizations beneath them. Instead it sparked fierce competition among opportunistic lieutenants and rival groups. The homicide rate nearly tripled during his presidency, from about 8 per 100,000 in 2007 to over 22 per 100,000 by 2010, and recorded political assassinations rose from 12 under Fox to 85 under Calderon. **Why are mayors targeted more than other politicians?** Mayors and local municipal authorities direct whom local police pursue, making them both a threat to cartels and a prize worth controlling. Cartels target candidates who promise crackdowns, sitting mayors who resist, and even former mayors who might expose past corruption. Of nearly 500 political assassinations between 2000 and 2021, 273 involved mayors at some stage; 99 were sitting incumbents and 146 were former mayors. **Were the 2025 judicial elections as violent as feared?** No. Despite widespread concern, the bloodshed of 2024 did not recur. The only high-profile assassinations involved mayoral candidates in Veracruz, which was simultaneously holding municipal elections. Analysts suggest judges were spared because they deliver verdicts rather than indictments or law enforcement actions, offering cartels less direct leverage. Still, at least 16 candidates with known cartel ties reached the ballot, and with 13% turnout every Supreme Court seat went to candidates tied to Morena. ## Sources - ACLED, "Elections Under Capture: Criminal Wars and the Targeting of Political Figures in Guanajuato, Guerrero, and Michoacan" - "Five key takeaways from the 2024 elections in Mexico" - "935 candidates withdraw from their political aspirations" - "Political violence casts a shadow over the start of the 2024 electoral process" - "Causes and electoral consequences of political assassinations: The role of organized crime in Mexico" - "Drug cartels are Mexico's fifth largest employer with 175,000 on payroll, study finds," The Independent - "The Fentanyl Trade Through Mexico, Explained in 8 Graphs" - "Mexico's ruling party, Morena, has captured the judiciary" - "A History of Opium Commodity Chains in Mexico, 1900-1950," Journal of Illicit Economies and Development - "The Road to the Judicial Elections in Mexico," WOLA - "Mexican Drug Trade: How the Trafficking Problem First Began," TIME - "Reducing cartel recruitment is the only way to lower violence in Mexico," Science - "Life on the Margins in a Kingdom of Cartels," Literary Hub - "Double Injustice: How Mexico's Criminal Justice System Fails Victims and the Accused in Homicide Investigations," Human Rights Watch - "Migration in Chiapas: Crime, Impunity and Death," Contra Corriente - "Crisis, corruption and state-led development in the making of the Mexican drug trade," Past & Present, Oxford Academic - "Mexican Drug War 2006-2012," EBSCO Research Starters - "Mexico election 2024: Country suffers its most violent election campaign" - "Mexico's land and elections feuds threaten political figures in Oaxaca and Chiapas" - "Politicians in the Crosshairs of Mexico's Criminal Wars: The Cases of Guanajuato, Guerrero, and Michoacan" - "Mexico's External Debt Policies, 1982-90" <!-- youtube:I5PDs26EkB0 -->