Enrique Alfaro of the liberal Citizens Movement won a landslide victory on Sunday to become Guadalajara’s next mayor.
The leftist Citizens Movement, or MC, won a sweeping landslide victory in Jalisco state, a key economic hub in Mexico’s west, in Sunday’s elections.
MC won the mayor’s race in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city. Candidate Enrique Alfaro beat the PRI’s Ricardo Villanueva by approximately 30 percentage points, tallies said.
“The backing that we had represents a great commitment for us. A commitment to not fail the people, a commitment to be a good government, and a commitment to begin a phase of reconciliation and dialogue so that we can resolve all of the differences that were generated during the campaign period,” Alfaro said in a press conference Sunday night.
Jalisco has long been considered one of Mexico’s more conservative states. Alfaro attributed his win to voters growing “upset, tired, and disappointed” at the way the city has been run. He will be the first Guadalajara mayor not to represent the PRI or the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, since 1929.
Citizens Movement also claimed victory in the Pacific Coast resort city of Puerto Vallarta and in many other municipalities across Jalisco.
“This suggests that we can become the primary force in the Jalisco state congress,” Alfaro said as thousands of MC supporters gathered at Guadalajara’s iconic Minerva fountain to celebrate the historic victories.
The Citizens Movement’s dramatic triumph in Guadalajara was matched by the anticipated victory of Pedro Kumamoto, who became the first ever independent candidate elected to the Jalisco state congress.
A recent college graduate, Kumamoto, 25, led a grassroots campaign to victory. In an interview last month, he told VICE News that he received just $1,188 in public funding — or just over one percent of the campaign spending limit of 1.3 million pesos.
“We’re going to be pushing for broad and important political reforms so that independent candidates can become not just a nice idea but a genuinely useful tool,” Kumamoto said days before the election…
This section is part of a broader VICE News piece on Sunday’s elections that I contributed to. Click here to read it in full.
Violent demonstrations and political killings threaten to disrupt mid-term elections in Mexico
The funeral procession for one of the victims featured a chrome-and-black stretch Hummer hearse. Photo by Victor Hugo Ornelas.
“You said you’d come back to me but it’s not true!” the bereaved woman wailed between tears on Monday, as she led the funeral procession of one of the 42 men killed by Mexican federal security forces at a ranch held by a drug cartel.
Clutching a photo of the deceased — a middle-aged man with brown skin and a moustache whom mourners referred to only as “El Blanco” — the woman walked directly behind the hearse, an ostentatious black-and-chrome stretch Hummer, down Avenida Madero to the local cemetery of Ocotlan, Jalisco.
The men killed at the ranch in Michoacan state were largely from Ocotlan, mostly young men in their late teens or early twenties.
Authorities say they belonged to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG in Spanish, the violent group that ambushed federal forces in this same town in March, provoking a ferocious, two-hour shootout that left eleven people dead. The vast majority of the dead in Friday’s incident were from Jalisco, and at least 25 were reportedly residents of Ocotlan…
I wrote this feature in collaboration with Victor Hugo Ornelas for VICE News. Click here to read it in full.
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