Blood on the campaign trail

Blood on the campaign trail

by The Economist online | MEXICO CITY

MEXICO has been shaken by what is reckoned to be its highest-profile political assassination in more than 15 years. Rodolfo Torre, the front-runner to become the next governor of the northern border state of Tamaulipas, was shot dead by masked gunmen along with four supporters on June 28th, just six days before the election. The killers have not been identified and probably never will be, but it is assumed that they were linked to the Zetas or Gulf “cartels”, rival drug-trafficking organisations which have been involved in an increasingly bloody squabble for control of Tamaulipas in recent months.

Mr Torre, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had made the fight against the narcos his main message. His killing is the most prominent political murder since the 1994 killing of Donaldo Colosio, the front-running presidential candidate of that year, whose murder has never really been explained despite the conviction of a lone gunman. But it is not the first time this year that politics has been interrupted by violence. On May 13th another Tamaulipas politician, José Mario Guajardo, a member of the National Action Party (PAN), was shot dead with his son and an employee. Mr Guajardo had been running on an anti-narco platform to be mayor of the town of Valle Hermoso.

Mexicans feel wounded that there is so much coverage of the drug-related violence in their country, despite the fact that the murder rate in Mexico remains lower than in many Latin American countries. Most of the mayhem is trafficker-on-trafficker. But the spilling over of the violence into politics makes a big difference. On May 15th Diego "El Jefe" (“The Boss”) Fernández, another 1994 presidential candidate, was kidnapped from his ranch in Querétaro. The disappearance of El Jefe, whose kidnappers are believed still to be negotiating a ransom, marked a recent high in the reach of organised crime.

The question of how far the violence affects ordinary Mexicans and foreign investors is increasingly pressing. In northern cities such as Monterrey, the violence is acting as a brake on economic recovery. Mr Torre’s murder contributed to a weakening of the peso on Monday, which closed 0.46% down at 12.71 to the US dollar. The attack represented “the clearest attack on the political process since crime became a focal point for markets in early 2009,” according to Jimena Zuñiga of Barclays Capital.

Mexico's drug war is still a far cry from Colombia's in the 1990s. Ms Zuñiga offers three differences: unlike Colombia’s FARC guerrillas, Mexico’s drug-traffickers are not ideologically motivated; the violence remains concentrated geographically; and gangs have so far avoided the type of mass attacks on civil society that would most affect confidence and investment. But Mr Torre’s killing is likely to draw a strong response from the federal government, whose deployment of the army since 2006 to fight the drugs traffickers has already seen an increase in violence. It may be that one murder in Tamaulipas provokes many more.