MEXICO CITY — Gunmen assassinated the front-running candidate for governor of a Mexican border state Monday in what President Felipe Calderon called an attempt by drug gangs to sway local and state elections set for this weekend.
The assailants ambushed Rodolfo Torre’s vehicle as he headed to the airport in Ciudad Victoria, capital of Tamaulipas, a state torn by a turf battle between two rival drug cartels. At least four other people traveling with him were killed.
“Today has proven that organized crime is a permanent threat and that we should close ranks to confront it and avoid more actions like the cowardly assassination that today has shaken the country,” Calderon said in a televised speech. “We cannot and should not permit crime to impose its will or its perverse rules.”
He warned that organized crime “wants to interfere in the decisions of citizens and in electoral processes.”
Torre, 46, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was the first gubernatorial candidate assassinated in Mexico in recent memory. He was the highest-ranking candidate killed since Luis Donaldo Colosio, also with the PRI, was gunned down while running for president in 1994.
The attack was the biggest setback yet for Sunday’s elections in 12 states. Corruption scandals, threats and attacks on politicians have raised fears for months that Mexico’s powerful drug cartels are buying off candidates they support and intimidating those they oppose.
Last month, gunmen killed Jose Guajardo Varela, a candidate for mayor of the Tamaulipas town of Valle Hermoso. Guajardo, of Calderon’s National Action Party, or PAN, had received warnings to drop his campaign.
Several parties had said they could not find anyone to run for mayor in some towns in Tamaulipas and other border states because of drug-gang intimidation.
In the worst corruption scandal of the election, Cancún Mayor Gregorio Sanchez was arrested last month for alleged drug-trafficking ties, forcing him to drop his campaign for governor of Quintana Roo state. Sanchez was charged with protecting two of Mexico’s most brutal drug gangs, allegations he dismissed as politically motivated.
Calderon’s government did not say which gang was suspected in Torre’s assassination or why he would have been targeted.
Tamaulipas, which borders Texas, has become a battleground between the Gulf Cartel and its former ally, the Zetas gang of hit men. Tamaulipas state election authorities met to decide whether to suspend the vote.
Torre, a physician, had served as the state’s health secretary from 2005 to 2009. He was married and had three teenage children.
