A 42-year-old woman running for mayor has been kidnapped and decapitated in a southwestern Mexican state where previous murders sparked the biggest crisis of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration.
State prosecutors said the body of Aide Nava was found in northern Guerrero, where 43 trainee teachers were abducted and almost certainly massacred last year, sparking an international outcry over criminal violence in Mexico.
A spokesman for the prosecutors said Nava, a candidate from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), was kidnapped on Tuesday in the town of Ahuacuotzingo, the municipality she hoped to become mayor of in June elections.
A note left next to her body was signed “Los Rojos”, which is one of the main criminal groups in Guerrero.
The note threatened the same treatment for any politician who does not “fall in line”.
Nava’s son was kidnapped last year and remains missing.
Her husband, the former mayor of the same town she aspired to lead, was murdered in 2014.
Guerrero, along with eight other Mexican states, is set to hold gubernatorial elections in June. While election authorities have not canceled the vote, many doubt that a successful election in Guerrero can be held due in large part to the violence.
Peña Nieto, who pledged to restore order to Mexico when he took office in December 2012, had to contend with a string of street protests over the disappearance of the students on September 26th, 2014, in the city of Iguala.
According to the government, the students were abducted by corrupt local police in league with a drug gang. Iguala’s PRD mayor and his wife were accused by the attorney general’s office of being the architects of the crime.
More than 100,000 people have died in violence linked to drug cartels in Mexico during the past eight years.