On 11/26, an armed group murdered four community police in the El Fortín barrio, located in the municipal capital of Tixtla, Guerrero. The victims belong to the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities (CRAC) of La Patria es Primero House of Justice. According to members of this organization, the attack was carried out when the community police were attending to a “call from the citizenry” that led them to said barrio, where they were riddled with bullets.
This act occurred three days before the special elections for a municipal president (mayor) in that Guerrero municipality, after the electoral process of last June 7 was annulled because of the protests of normalistas and parents demanding justice for the case of the 43 Ayotzinapa students that disappeared on September 26, 2014. Significantly, the massacre in Tixtla –a municipality in which the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College at Ayotzinapa is located– also coincided in time with the commemoration of the 14 months that passed since the attack on the students in Iguala, which has not been convincingly and satisfactorily clarified, nor has any act of justice been seen to compensate the victims and their families.
A third contextual element is the climate of violence that exists in the Guerrero municipality, originally attributed to confrontation between the criminal gangs Los Rojos and Los Ardillos, but in recent months has acquired a clear political component: according to denunciations of the Tixtla Popular Assembly –an organization that boycotted the June 7 elections–, those mafias maintain alliances with the traditional political parties in the region, fundamentally the PRI and the PRD, the ones that, at their turn, have taken advantage of the referenced gangs to harass and attack political opponents. As examples of that intermingling among crime and the political parties, the Tixtla Popular Assembly has denounced the presence of armed individuals, allegedly related to the tricolor (PRI) and the sol azteca (PRD) at campaign events for the municipal presidency, and has reported that during the six months of the interim government headed by the PRIista Raúl Vega Astudillo –a cousin of the governor of Guerrero, Héctor Astudillo– eight murders and 18 disappearances have taken place.
The inescapable correlation of this violence is the decision of the Tixtla Popular Assembly not to boycott next Sunday’s elections and to participate in them in alliance with the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, Morena). [1] Such a decision has set an unusual precedent in the country’s political history, inasmuch as it implies the articulation of a popular movement with a national political party, which permits the former to direct it socials demands through institutional means and to participate in the electoral arena.
Immediately, the homicides perpetrated last evening diminish the enthusiasm that had awakened participation in the Tixtla community and destabilize the coming electoral process; feed the climate of political contraction that municipality experiences and belie the political, social and legal normality aspired to that, according to the new government of Guerrero, has favor in the state.
Voluntarily or involuntarily, the material and intellectual authors of the crimes committed in Tixtla have attacked not just against the lives of four persons, but also against the aspirations for re-establishing democratic normality in Guerrero territory and, in particular, in that municipality, and against the battered credibility of the country’s political and electoral institutions.