Registrar Hernán Penagos will be head of international observation in Mexican elections

On June 2, the presidential elections will be held in Mexico, which are considered the largest in the history of the North American country. For the electoral process, the registrar of Colombia, Hernán Penagos, was chosen as the head of the International Electoral Observation Mission.

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On this election day, the President of the Republic, 128 senators, 500 deputies and more than 19 thousand positions at local levels will be elected.

Registrar Hernán Penagos mentioned that this “will be a good opportunity to learn from one of the largest electoral systems on the continent. We will work for the integrity of the Mexican democratic system and to contribute to the strengthening of democracy in the region”.

Penagos was invited by the National Electoral Institute of Mexico (INE), the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights (IIDH) and the Electoral Advisory and Promotion Center, CAPEL.

Mexican elections, the most violent

Mexico’s biggest election will also go down in history on Sunday as the most violent, with at least 30 candidates murdered and more than 200 political homicideswhile the opposition denounces that organized crime puts votes in almost 30% of the territory at risk.

As a hallmark of violence, in the last hours of the campaigns, Alfredo Cabrera, candidate of the opposition coalition Fuerza y ​​Corazón por México for mayor of Coyuca de Benítez, in the southern state of Guerrero, was murdered with two shots to the back of the head.

“This has been the most violent election in the modern history of our country. In hard terms, in numbers, from September 2023 to May 26, 2024, one week before the election, We have counted 749 total victims of violent attacks“explains Armando Vargas, senior consultant at Integralia.

Integralia, a political consultancy, reported 150.5% more attacks in this electoral process, which officially began in September, compared to the last midterm elections in 2021, which includes murders, armed attacks, threats, kidnappings and disappearances.

Within this, documented 34 murders of candidates, a figure that rises to 231 homicides when also considering officials or former officials, politicians, family members and collateral victims.

The Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC) recognized this Tuesday the murder of 22 candidates, but independent organizations register more, such as Integralia, while Data Cívica reports 31, Causa en Común documents 32 and DataInt registers 38.

This difference reflects that the “federal government continues to deny the violent reality of the country,” says Nancy Angélica Canjura, researcher at Causa en Común.

“And always in this defensive attitude. Instead of generating conditions of openness and innovation in public policies to work on these issues, we see how there is this reluctance to even accept the dimension of the problem,” he comments.

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