Mexican Candidate for Governor Is Assassinated

[Judi Lynn]

Source: New York Times

Mexican Candidate for Governor Is Assassinated
By MARC LACEY
Published: June 28, 2010

Mexican Candidate for Governor Is Assassinated

MEXICO CITY — A popular gubernatorial candidate from Mexico’s northeastern Tamaulipas State who had made increased security his prime campaign pledge was killed along with at least four others on Monday morning after gunmen opened fire on his motorcade as he headed to a campaign event, the authorities said. The killing of the candidate, Rodolfo Torre Cantú, 46, drove election-related violence here to a peak unseen since 1994, when a presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated.

Mr. Torre’s death followed the killing of a mayoral candidate and another of an activist during a get-out-the-vote effort. Explosives have been thrown at two separate campaign offices.

Immediate suspicion in the Torre case fell on drug cartels since Tamaulipas, bordering Texas on the gulf coast, has been the site of fierce fighting in recent months between rival trafficking organizations, the Zetas and their former allies, the Gulf Cartel.

Mr. Torre, 46, a burly, gray-haired surgeon and federal congressman, was engaged in a last minute flurry of campaigning for elections scheduled on July 4 when the attack occurred. Representing the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., which currently controls Tamaulipas, Mr. Torre had been leading in polls.





Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/americas/29mexico.html

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http://www.grupoflores.com.mx.nyud.net:8090/centinela/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Rodolfo_Torre_Cantu1_965455236_894197408.jpg

[demosincebirth]

1. When is it going to stop?

[defendandprotect]

3. Actually, the Mexican drug violence is underlying Arizona's violence... spilling over ...

that's where they're suffering actual crime -- a bounce back from our ridiculous

"Drug War" -- !!

[JackRiddler]

5. The drug war caused this, ending it might help...

Allowing Mexico to protect its corn trade might also help.

A 50-foot fence won't help.

[demosincebirth]

6. I agree that we are at fault for our consumption of the Illegal drugs. The answer...

has always been to take the profit out of it. The war on drugs has been going on for decades and has cost us billions of dollars and this is one war that is never been winnable

[GlennWRECK]

10. Conservative hypocrites.

The fence only attacks the symptoms.
If you want to keep them out you're gonna have to pass laws limiting their rights as aliens.

Fence won't do shit except waste more tax dollars... quite hypocritical of the conservs...

[LiberalFighter]

2. I wonder what type of connection Bush had with the drug cartel?

Bush wanted a war with Iraq but he wouldn't invade Mexico and put the drug cartel out.

[a la izquierda]

9. Do you have ANY idea what invading Mexico would do?

You think a million died during the Revolution just for fun? There would be a bloodbath unlike anything our country has seen in a century.

Mexico does not suffer foreign invasions lightly.

[Art_from_Ark]

13. Which Revolution are you referring to?

There have been quite a few in Mexico's history, but I don't think there have been any in the last 90 years or so.

It is true that Mexicans didn't particularly care for the installment of Maximilian as their overlord, and dispatched him within a couple of years. But they didn't particularly rise up in arms against General Pershing when he went on his wild Pancho Villa chase back in 1916-17:

"As in past American invasions (e.g., the Mexican War of 1846-1848), the Pershing Expedition was a financial “boon” to Mexico. The American soldiers’ wants were catered to and satisfied everywhere they went. Prices skyrocketed. If they so desired, soldiers could submerge themselves in Mexican beer. Cantinas were open all night. In many restaurants soldiers devoured “deer” meat that once ran in the streets barking. Life was hard only when the Americans marched or rode along the dirt roads and were eating their dry ration crackers and looking for water. Dublan was transformed into an enormous military encampment complete with a railhead where tons of supplies were unloaded by a thousand civilian workers. The soldiers and civilians worked by day and brawled by night in the saloons and bordellos that had sprung up in the once sleepy town.10"

http://www.hsgng.org/pages/pancho.htm

[a la izquierda]

14. There was a giant civil war from 1910-1920

About a million people died, fighting corruption, oppression and the oligarchy. One of the main triggers: too much foreign influence in business.
Who was going to rise up against Pershing? The government was in chaos. And he was not in the country with American troops for too long (and he never caught Villa). Your suggestion that the Mexican American war was a boon is so laughable. It plunged Mexico into a serious civil war which culminated with the French Invasion.

So, a little beer and tourist bucks compliments of the US Army is positively nothing compared to losing your 2/5 of your national territory and being invaded (in the 19th century case). And Black Jack Pershing's expedition was...a failure. So, sorry to trash your premise (and I'm certainly not trying to be a bitch, I'm just really tired of silly comments such as the post to which I responded).

(By the way, you're preaching to a woman who will have a PhD in Latin American history in about 6 months. I specialize in 20th century Mexico).

[Art_from_Ark]

15. I'm not preaching

And I did not suggest that Mexicans were accommodating to American soldiers during the Mexican-American -- that was included in the excerpt I took from the link I posted. But I have no doubt about the reception Pershing got-- lots of jobs were created for Mexicans, and the Mexicans had fun pointing Pershing in all the wrong directions. My grandfather was in Pershing's expedition-- he used to laugh when talking about how they ran all over Mexico looking for Pancho Villa.

Regarding your reference to the civil war, or Reform War, of 1858-61, perhaps the war can be traced in part to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, but the problems of haves versus have-nots, and Church versus liberal thinkers, had long been a problem in Mexico. It is interesting to note that the Mexican government under Benito Juarez had actually appealed to the US government to intervene when the French invaded in 1862, and Lincoln supplied Juarez' forces with arms.

Another interesting tidbit was that the Confederacy made overtures to Juarez' government, but their emissary was imprisoned in Mexico for a month or so for his efforts. Perhaps Juarez was a little ticked that so many of the Confederate generals had participated in the Mexican-American War, and the Confederate president himself had been a colonel in that conflict.

[defendandprotect]

4. Really sad . . . Mexico seems to exist to serve America's interests/debt . . .

Rather, they need to be investing in their own nation and providing jobs

for their own citizens IN MEXICO!!

drove election-related violence here to a peak unseen since 1994, when a presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated.

This was another immense battle to keep liberal leadership out of power --

and pre-trade agreements --

[GETPLANING]

7. Mexico is falling apart

NAFTA, an illigitimate president, and the army, police, and drug cartels all at war with one another for control of the drug trade with the USA.

Not at war to eliminate the drug trade, to CONTROL it. Read "Murder City", by Charles Bowden.

[glinda]

8. Our southern border is a huge national security risk.

[aquart]

11. Legalize and end the profit.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Mexican governor candidate killed by gunmen, Calderon says assassination tied to drug gang violence

Mexican governor candidate killed by gunmen, Calderon says assassination tied to drug gang violence
BY Meena Hartenstein
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Monday, June 28th 2010, 8:27 PM

Just two days after singer Sergio Vega's murder rocked Mexico, the country reeled again Monday with the news that gunmen had assassinated Rodolfo Torre, the leading candidate for governor of a Mexican border state.

Torre was ambushed by attackers as he headed to the airport in Tamaulipas, the Associated Press reported, a state ravaged by violent drug gangs. At least four people traveling with him were also killed.

President Felipe Calderon condemned the murders in a televised press conference, warning against the efforts of organized crime to affect the country's elections.

"Today has proven that organized crime is a permanent threat and that we should close ranks to confront it," Calderon said. "We cannot and should not permit crime to impose its will or its perverse rules."

Torre, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is the first gubernatorial candidate to be assassinated in Mexico in recent memory.

More:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/06/28/2010-06-28_mexican_governor_candidate_killed_by_gunmen_calderon_says_assassination_tied_to_.html

[Judi Lynn]

16. Mexico: Where Bullets are Intimidating the Ballot

Mexico: Where Bullets are Intimidating the Ballot
By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City Tuesday, Jun. 29, 2010

Last Friday, gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre raised both arms to the sky in front of 15,000 cheering white-shirted supporters in a baseball stadium minutes from the Rio Grande. After he promised security in his violence-ridden border state of Tamaulipas, the crowd erupted to his campaign anthem, sung to the catchy tune of the smash hit "I Gotta Feeling," by U.S. pop band Black Eyed Peas. They had reason for celebration. Opinion polls all concurred the mustachioed physician would win the July 4 election by a landslide of more than 30 points. But on Monday, as Torre left the state capital to conclude his campaign, assailants showered his convoy with gunfire from automatic rifles and heavy caliber weapons, killing him instantly. Army commanders said the attack bore all the signs of the Zetas, a paramilitary drug gang that was born in the state.

Mexico's most high-profile political assassination since the 1994 murder of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was a blow not only to Torre's supporters but to the nation's whole ailing democracy. On July 4, voters will choose governors in 12 of 31 states in a "Super Sunday" of local elections. The ballots come almost exactly a decade after the nation voted to end 71 years of one-party rule. But rather than showcasing the success of multiparty democracy, the campaigns have highlighted its hazards. Races have been dampened by arrests of candidates on racketeering charges, leaked tapes of organized vote buying and a succession of violent attacks. After the Torre killing, some politicians asked for half of the races to be suspended. "This is extremely worrying," says political scientist Maria Eugenia Valdes. "If there is fear and violence, there is no freedom. And if there is no freedom we cannot have fair elections."

A key problem is that many of the polls are in the states hardest hit by the relentless drug war, including Chihuahua, home to Ciudad Juarez, which has a reputation for being one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican organized crime. Tamaulipas, a state that shares a border with Texas and has three of the busiest land cargo-crossing points into the United States, has this year been engulfed by bloody battles between the Zetas and their old masters in the Gulf cartel. Back in the 1990s, the cartel founded the Zetas, recruiting defectors from the army special forces to be its brutal enforcers. But the Zetas broke away to smuggle their own drugs as well as carry out rampant extortion and kidnapping. The fighting has littered the Tamaluipas streets with hundreds of bodies and led to prolonged shootouts that have shut down schools and work places.

The Zetas have also suffered — hit heavily by arrests, firefights with the army and by rival gangs in other states, including Sinaloa, where 28 of their alleged members were slaughtered in a prison riot. Such devastating losses could have led them to lash out against the establishment.

The violence in Tamaulipas has scarred all major political parties. Last month, triggermen silenced a mayoral candidate from the conservative National Action Party (PAN) of President Felipe Calderón, gunning him down in his farm supplies store along with his son in the town of Valle Hermoso. In nearby Nuevo Laredo, assassins wiped out two people close to the mayoral candidate of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), then strung up banners warning, "This is what happens to everyone who supports these f---ing people." Gubernatorial candidate Torre himself was a lifelong member of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which currently controls Tamaulipas. While focusing on law and order, the 46-year-old former federal deputy made no radical or controversial proposals.

More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2000511,00.html?xid=rss-world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+time%2Fworld+%28TIME%3A+Top+World+Stories%29