So, far, 132 officials and candidates have been murdered in this election cycle. I spoke with voting rights activist (and movie star) Yareli Arizmendi in Mexico City, who told me that the old guard politicians were tied up with the Zetas and other drug gangs.
In all fairness, I should note that many victims were not just AMLO allies but also PRI, Green Party and independents who challenged the control of their cities and states by narco-traficantes.
Indeed, AMLO's campaign gained fuel when, in 2014, the public learned of the disappearance of 43 students (and 3 investigating journalists). Evidence now indicates they were hacked to pieces and dissolved in acid by the Guerreros Unidos gang -- on orders from a politician connected to the ruling party.
Arizmendi reports that ballots have been burnt in gang- and ruling-party controlled districts. She sent me a video of a woman pre-marking a stack of ballots.
I saw this game up close in 2006 when I was sent by the Guardian and Democracy Now to investigate AMLO's shock loss by just half a percent of the vote.
On election night, AMLO was way ahead when the official count was halted--then resumed with a massive reversal in the final count. Our investigators found massive ballot-box stuffing, ballot box dumping and intimidation of voters at gunpoint. There were games with electoral rolls apparently orchestrated by the Bush Administration which, I found, had used the same company that helped Katherine Harris rig the 2000 election in Florida, ChoicePoint, to steal Mexico's entire voter roll! (Watch this Democracy Now! report, "Florida con Salsa," from Mexico City.)
And this time, the incumbent PRI hired Cambridge Analytica. Trump's social-media manipulators and data thieves were paid $7.2 million on their promise--I can't make this up--to repeat a Mexican variant of their "Corrupt Hillary" campaign to smear AMLO.
It was a hard sell, especially as the wife of the current President, PRI man Enrique Peña Nieto, was caught taking a $7 million condo from a government contractor.
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