After months of litigation and political uncertainty, a federal election court has decided the election for mayor of Ciudad Juárez. In a Sunday ruling, Mexico’s Federal Election Tribunal (TEPJF) upheld a lower court decision that granted the win in the July 1 election to incumbent Mayor Armando Cabada, who was allowed to run for re-election because of recent Mexican political reforms.
Left out in the political cold was Javier González Mocken, a former interim mayor who was the candidate of President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena Party and Together We Will Make History coalition. Prior to jumping on the Morena bandwagon, Mocken, as the losing candidate is commonly referred to in Juárez, enjoyed a longtime association with outgoing President Enrique Peña Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
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The Mexican flag
The election tribunal’s decision capped a turbulent political process, beginning with July’s official victory certification of Mocken by Juarez’s Municipal Electoral Assembly after a recount, the reversal of that decision in August by the Chihuahua State Electoral Tribunal, and Mocken’s subsequent, unsuccessful appeals to both the Guadalajara circuit of the TEPFJ and the superior court in Mexico City.
The legal dispute over the mayoral race finally centered on a couple dozen polling stations that Cabada contended were illegally staffed by ineligible vote counters. Both the Guadalajara and Mexico City courts agreed with Cabada, throwing out ballots from disputed precincts and effectively giving Cabada a slight but decisive edge of 489 votes over Mocken.
“I respect the (legal) decisions and wish success to Mr. Cabada, and with it to our beloved city,” a subdued Mocken was quoted in Nortedigitial.com as saying shortly after the TEPFJ’s final ruling.
A former newscaster whose family owns the Channel 44 television station that airs in Juárez, El Paso and nearby areas, Cabada didn’t waste a moment applying the TEPFJ’s verdict. He was sworn in for a new three-year term early on Monday, along with the new 20-member city council.
Political and criminal chaos
As the post-election conflict dragged out in the courts, resurgent criminal violence tore away at Juárez, Chihuahua City to the south and rural areas in different parts of Mexico’s geographically largest state bordering Texas and New Mexico.
Juárez press accounts and numbers compiled by New Mexico State University researcher Molly Molloy report at least 1,600 people slain statewide between the start of January and the close of August of this year, including approximately 900 in Juárez alone.
Reminiscent of the so-called drug war that devastated the border city from 2008 to 2012, this year’s violence has featured public executions in broad daylight, gruesome massacres, the murders of children, and the proliferation of narco threats directed against rivals like the recent video posted on social media that depicted a group of heavily armed, masked men purportedly from the Murder Artists gang mocking and challenging rivals.
Notably, Juárez’s downtown core just across from the international bridges connecting to El Paso, Texas, has been hard hit by numerous fatal shootings.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. Department of State has issued new travel advisories for Juárez and other regions of Chihuahua. The violence and related travel warnings seriously jeopardize economic development efforts designed to revive international visitation to Juárez, including an ambitious plan for a medical tourism cluster and a downtown revitalization project that’s proceeded in fits and starts during the last decade.
If the 2008-12 bloodletting largely involved two main groups competing for control of the illicit economy, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Juárez Cartel, the renewed bout of violence pits four or more groups previously allied with the two big ones but now arrayed not only against their historic enemies but traditional partners as well, posing a dystopian scenario of all against all.
Cited in the border press, authorities blame the spike in violence in Juárez on the booming retail trade in methamphetamines, a drug now reportedly cheaper in price than cocaine or heroin. Violence in the rural areas of Chihuahua, meanwhile, tends to revolve around control of opium-producing and exporting zones, where organized criminal groups have reportedly penetrated and disrupted the political sphere.
The mayor elect of Gómez Farias, Chihuahua, Dr. Blas Godínez of Morena, was shot and gravely wounded on Friday. He was reportedly clinging to life on Monday. Godínez’s father, a former Chihuahua state health official, has been missing since last November, according to Mexican press stories.
Godínez’s elected alternate, Dr. Alen Muñoz Loya of the allied Social Encounter Party (PES), was expected to assume office Monday.
“Although governing these municipalities implicitly brings with it uncertainty, they are brave and noble people who seek the best for their communities,” Chihuahua state PES leader Edilberto Royval Sosa told El Diario de Juárez.
Earlier, on September 2, Morena activist Jesús Moncada Campos was gunned down outside his home in Anáhuac, another town located in the violent drug corridor.
According to El Diario, Moncada’s killing was the fifth, major politically-tainted murder in Chihuahua state so far during the big election year of 2018. The victims hailed variously from the PRI, PES, Morena, PRD and PAN parties.
Editorialized Ciudad Juárez’s Nortedigital.com:
“What happened to the mayor elect of Gómez is a sign of something that the pages of Norte have been denouncing since the beginning of 2017: narco infiltration of police structures, government and political processes. The publication of these investigations cost the life of (murdered journalist) Miroslava Breach and the exile of (journalist) Patricia Mayorga.
“There is no valid argument that justifies government inefficiency. The latest homicide statistics confirm the advance of (socio-political) decomposition, and the citizens are those who pay the highest price…”
A beacon or a boneyard?
Juárez and Chihuahua represent a key test case of governance for the incoming administration of President-elect López Obrador, as well as newly-elected state and municipal officials. The state might even emerge as either a beacon or a boneyard in López Obrador’s pledges to begin the transformation of Mexico into a more democratic, peaceful and just nation.
In fact, Juárez is a cornestone of left-leaning López Obrador’s planned social and economic reforms meant to trigger a new political era in Mexico known as the “Fourth Republic.” The president-elect has unveiled a package of tax cuts, business incentives, wage hikes and other measures for Juárez and the northern border region.
Yet political power in Chihuahua is currently split among different forces, as a result of elections in 2016 and 2018. Javier Corral of the conservative PAN party serves as governor. The new state legislature is divided among jockeying parties. Independent Armando Cabada remains at the helm of Juárez, the state’s largest and most economically important city with about 1.4 million people.
Though Corral, Cabada and López Obrador have all recently appeared together and expressed common goals, tensions sizzle as the public safety situation deteriorates.
For instance, the attacks on Morena politicians in Gómez Farías and Anáhuac prompted some Chihuahua Morena leaders to demand Governor Corral’s resignation.
“The incapacity of the governor and his lack of interest have stood out on repeated occasions,” charged Morena state party chief Martín Chaparro in El Diario. “It’s necessary that he goes.”
While not calling on Corral to exit the stage, López Obrador’s choice to head the powerful federal Interior Ministry, Olga Sánchez Cordero, was also quoted by the newspaper as sharply condemning the attack on Blas Godínez.
“We will not tolerate any type of violence, and won’t permit that acts like this one stay unpunished,” Sánchez vowed.
Kent Paterson is an independent journalist who covers issues in the U.S./Mexico border region.