Jan. 4 2016, 11:53 p.m.
GISELA
RAQUEL MOTA OCAMPO, the
first woman elected mayor of Temixco, a city in the central Mexican state
of Morelos, was expected to take on organized crime directly. She
never got the chance. The 33-year-old assumed office on New Year’s Day. Less
than 24 hours later she was dead, murdered in her own home by an alleged crew
of paid assassins.
According to reports, sometime
shortly after 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, intruders entered Mota’s home, tied
her up, beat her, and shot her in the head. Authorities responding to a call
reporting a possible homicide soon found themselves in a car chase with the
suspected killers. A gunfight ensued that left two of the suspects dead,
authorities said, while three others — including a minor, a 32-year-old woman,
and an 18-year-old man — were captured alive.
Gisela Mota
Photo: Facebook
In a statement, the state
prosecutor’s office reported that loads of ammunition, a 9 mm pistol, an
Uzi submachine gun, bulletproof vests, and balaclavas were recovered from the
suspects’ vehicle. One of the detained suspects, a government source told the
Mexican newspaper Reforma, said the team of assassins was paid
roughly $29,000 to murder the mayor — though it was unclear whether that
payment was paid to each of the perpetrators or to the group — and that her
name was one of at least a half-dozen others on the team’s kill list.
In recent years, areas around
Temixco, some 60 miles south of Mexico City, have struggled mightily with
violence stemming from weak local institutions and deep-seated political
corruption and intimidation linked to a nexus of criminal groups seeking
control of the region’s lucrative, U.S.-bound drug-trafficking routes.
According to Graco Ramírez, the
governor of Morelos, the suspects in custody for Mota’s killing have said the
criminal group known as Los Rojos was responsible for the murder. Los Rojos
has been locked in a vicious, multi-year battle with its rival,
Guerreros Unidos, which in 2014 was accused of participating in the mass
disappearance and alleged slaughter of 43 students from a rural teaching in
Guerrero, a deeply impoverished state neighboring Morelos. (The unsolved case of the
missing students was cited in scathing op-ed published by the New York
Times Monday, which took the administration of President Enrique Peña
Nieto to task for “systematically” avoiding accountability in a series of
scandals.)
In a radio interview, Ramírez indicated Mota’s assassination might
have been linked to a national government effort to replace municipal
authorities with a single, unified state command. According to the governor,
Mota had supported the plan for a unified command. While Mota had not received
specific threats in the run-up to her murder, Ramírez said, other newly elected
mayors were under pressure from Los Rojos and Guerreros Unidos not to cede
control of local law enforcement to higher authorities. Such groups traditionally
rely on the coopting of municipal police to maintain power, execute
kidnappings, and aid in drug-trafficking logistics.
Ramírez described Mota’s killing as
“a message and a clear threat for the mayors who recently took office to not
accept the police coordination scheme that we have supported and that is being
built at a national level.” Following the murder, he ordered the State Security
Commission to assume control of police in 15 municipalities, including the
capital.
The state prosecutor in Morelos,
Javier Pérez Durón, has promised that Mota’s killers will be punished with “the
full weight of the law.” Whether the prosecutor will be able to make good on
the promise remains to be seen. According to the United Nations, from December
2006, when the Mexican government first sent the military into the streets to
take on the nation’s drug cartels (eventually securing extensive U.S. support),
to November 2012, a total of roughly 2 percent of 102,696 reported
homicides led to prosecutions.
For now, Mota joins a long list of
public officials killed on the job since the so-called war on drugs began to
intensify in Mexico — according to astatement posted by the Association of
Local Mexican Authorities, more than 1,000 municipal officials and nearly 100
mayors have been killed over the last decade. In the wake of
Mota’s murder, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) issued a
statement describing the slain local leader as “a strong and brave woman who on
taking office as mayor, declared that her fight against crime would be frontal
and direct.”
Mota’s final public Facebook post
was dated December 31, the day before she assumed her first — and last — day in
office. She is seen holding a newborn infant wrapped in blankets. “Without a
doubt the best gift that God could send us, my little nephew,” Mota wrote,
adding that she was “feeling blessed.”
Top photo: Family members of
the slain mayor of Temixco, Gisela Mota, mourn next to her casket during a
ceremony in her honor at the mayor’s office building in Temixco, Mexico,
Jan. 3, 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment