The mayor of a small town in southwestern Mexico, who was running for re-election, was murdered last Friday night, prosecutors said, amid a wave of attacks against candidates for local government office in the country, which is headed for general elections in early June.

The candidate of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), a national opposition faction, Humberto Amezcua would run for a new term in the June 2nd local elections in the municipality of Puyamo, in the southern part of Jalisco state.

The police officers who went after a call found the body “inside the vehicle” with “wounds apparently from a firearm”, explained the prosecutor’s office on the night of Friday to yesterday Saturday.

Via social networking sites, the head of the PRI’s state organization in Jalisco, Veronica Flores, lashed out at authorities, state and national, for the wave of violence generally attributed to organized crime — especially against elected officials — in Mexico, asking “how long ” will be continued.

In February, Jaime Vera Alanis, the Environmental Party’s mayoral candidate in Mascota, in the northwestern state of Jalisco, a suburb of Guadalajara, the state capital, was murdered.

On Wednesday, Tomás Morales Patrón, candidate of MORENA (“Movement for National Renaissance”), the party of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was assassinated for the office of mayor in Cilapa, a community in the southern state of Guerrero.

In Maravatio, in the western state of Michoacán, two mayoral candidates were murdered on February 26.

From June 4, 2023 to March 12, at least 43 people, including six women, were killed in election-related violence, 21 of whom were preparing to run, according to data from Laboratorio Electoral, a private research and analysis firm. .

Election-related killings have been recorded in 13 of Mexico’s 32 states so far, according to data compiled by the same firm.