Organized crime and violence in Mexico are leading to increasing numbers of migrants purportedly seeking asylum at the southern border, and experts warn that as the Mexican election cycle heats up, violence will also.
In Maravatio, a city about a three-and-a-half hour drive from Mexico City, two mayoral hopefuls were shot and killed within hours of one another on Monday, according to the Associated Press. Authorities have yet to confirm a motive for the murders, but current Mayor Jaime Hinojosa Campa said that “everything points toward” organized crime being behind the shootings.
According to a report by Reuters, cartel violence has become the leading reason Mexican nationals try to unlawfully cross into the United States. In decades past, it was working-age men in search of jobs who made the journey, but families allegedly fleeing violence are more common today.
Citing data from the Kino Border Initiative, Reuters claimed 88% of unlawful Mexican migrants are now escaping violence, a complete shift from several years earlier, when 87% of unlawful Mexican migrants were seeking work.
Border and security experts warn that as the election cycle heats up in Mexico, violence will become more frequent. Cartels frequently bribe candidates to assert influence, and if that does not work, they kill them. In the last election in 2021, about 36 political candidates were killed, according to the Associated Press.
As the violence pushes migrants to the United States, the cartels follow. The Dallas Express reported last year that a New York court issued an indictment for the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who were believed to be the primary drivers of the synthetic opioid fentanyl that is causing spikes in overdose deaths across the United States. The brothers are currently heading the Sinaloa Cartel, which is itself seeing internal violence and a power struggle over leadership.
A significant amount of cartel violence also involves the smuggling of unlawful migrants. Migrants pay smugglers to get them to the border, and the often lucrative deals have led to turf wars among competing gangs. InSight Crime reported that a November 2023 struggle in the border town of Sásabe turned violent when competing factions of the Sinaloa cartel went to war.
“They’ve fought in the past over drug trafficking routes, control of local authorities, elections, and corrupt security forces, but as far as I know, this is the first time they have fought over migrant smuggling routes,” said David Saucedo, a security analyst based in Mexico, per InSight Crime.
Rising cartel violence has led to Mexico being listed as a “high-risk” country on the 2024 Global Risk Map, putting the nation in the same category as Pakistan, Libya, and Peru. The report cites increasing violence from cartels as the driving reason for the ranking.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has called on the administration of President Joe Biden and recently-impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to clamp down on unlawful border crossings to prevent cartel violence from spilling into Texas.
“It is obvious that the cartels are emboldened by your failure of leadership at the border, and not without good reason,” Cruz wrote in a letter to Mayorkas in October. “Cartels have increased their yearly human smuggling profits twenty-six-fold since 2018, going from $500 million to $13 billion in a few short years.
“The crisis has had massive downstream effects. Fentanyl pours across the open border while agents are occupied processing the record number of illegal aliens being smuggled to our country,” Cruz added, as reported by Fox News.
The watchdog group Civic Data predicted that the 2024 election cycle could be the most deadly yet, while Integralia Consultants claimed that “organized crime will intervene like never before in local elections in 2024,” AP reported.
The threat of violence has had a chilling effect on voters, as residents in Maraviato told AP they would not vote in the elections following the killing of the two candidates out of fear of violence at the polls.
