A mayor was shot dead on Wednesday in the Mexican state of Morelos after having survived a previous assassination attempt earlier this year. He is the 14th mayor to be murdered since Claudia Sheinbaum became president in October 2024.
Valentín Lavín Romero, who was from the Green party, an ally of the ruling leftwing Morena party, was wounded at the end of January when hitmen shot him at a petrol station on a motorway.
This time the hitmen entered the town hall of Temoac, near Mexico City, in the middle of the day before shooting Lavín Romero dead and escaping on a motorbike.
Authorities are yet to identify a motive or suspects, but the Morelos prosecutor’s office vowed to “exhaust all lines of investigation”.
Almost 100 mayors have been murdered in Mexico since 2006, when the then president, Felipe Calderón, deployed the military to take on Mexico’s organised crime groups, ultimately causing drug-related violence to rise.
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