Violent Mexican states elect new governors

Mexicans headed to the polls Sunday to elect new governors in 12 states, with the ruling party seeking to maintain its decades-old grip on two regions beset by drug violence.

President Enrique Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is favored to keep the governorship in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, days after it was rocked by the 24-hour kidnapping of a famous football player. 

But the PRI faces a tighter race in the neighboring eastern state of Veracruz, another violence-scarred region it has controlled for decades where a human head was found near a polling place on Saturday.

The PRI holds the governorship in nine of the dozen states up for grabs, two years before presidential elections in 2018. The other 20 federal regions are not choosing new heads of government on Sunday.

"This election is a thermometer to see how things will turn out in 2018," Jose Antonio Crespo, a political expert at the Center for Economics Research and Teaching, told AFP.

Tamaulipas and Veracruz remained PRI strongholds even after the party lost its 71-year grip on the presidency in 2000. Pena Nieto returned the PRI to power in 2012.

- 'It's an election issue' -

Pena Nieto said after casting his vote for a local constitutional assembly in Mexico City that the elections were taking place in "an atmosphere of great civility."

But on the eve of the vote, a human head was found in a park near a school serving as a polling place in Veracruz, a state plagued by drug cartels.

A note threatening the local mayor and his son, a leftist candidate running for the state legislature, was left next to the head in the town of Emiliano Zapata, a military official told AFP.

"It's an election issue. But we have seen other things, criminal groups intimidating our people," said Rogelio Franco, state leader of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD).

In Veracruz, PRI candidate Hector Yunes Landa is deadlocked with his cousin, Miguel Angel Yunes, who is running under a coalition of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and the PRD.

The campaign was marked by mudslinging, with Yunes Landa accusing his cousin of being a "pervert," a reference to pedophilia allegations against Miguel Angel Yunes, which he denies.

They are in a virtual tie with Cuitlahuac Garcia Jimenez of the left-wing Morena party.

The oil-rich state has been run since 2010 by the unpopular Governor Javier Duarte, whose administration has been marred by drug violence and the killings of 18 journalists.

Victory for Morena could boost two-time failed presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who founded the movement after leaving the PRD in 2012.

- Accusations of cartel pressure -

In Tamaulipas, the PRI and the PAN exchanged accusations of bowing to pressures from drug cartels.

The Gulf and Zetas gangs have caused fear across the state, among the most dangerous in the country, with 5,500 people reported missing.

In 2010, PRI gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantu was assassinated. His brother, Egidio, replaced him and was elected.

This year's election was rocked by the kidnapping of football player Alan Pulido, a striker with Greek club Olympiakos who managed to fight off a kidnapper and call police just 24 hours after his abduction.

The timing of the kidnapping, just a week before the election, raised eyebrows in a country where few trust what the authorities tell them.

"The PRI thought that this would make them look like heroes or that it would scare people from voting," Crespo said. "But the opposite could happen. Anybody could win."

The PRI rejected claims that the kidnapping was turned into an electoral ploy.

Source: AFP