Mayor murdered in Mexico’s Veracruz state
COATZACOALCOS: A municipal mayor in Mexico’s violent eastern state of Veracruz was killed on Friday, local authorities said, just four days after a mayor-elect was murdered in the same state.
Victor Manuel Espinoza - mayor of Ixhuatlan de Madero, located some 270 kilometres northeast of Mexico City -- “was killed with four others including his wife” in the attack, THE state prosecutor’s OFICE SAID In a statement.
Authorities did not provide details concerning a possible motive for the attack, which occurred Friday night on a dirt road in a neighboring municipality near the state’s capital Xalapa.
The murders came days after a group of at least 30 armed men murdered Santana Cruz Bahena, mayor-elect of the municipality of Hidalgotitlan. That act was allegedly linked to a criminal GANG that trafics stolen Fuel.
Three more mayors were assassinated in other Mexican states last month, while nearly 50 have been killed since 2003, ACCORDING to igures From THE National Association of Mayors.
Violence in Veracruz has risen in 2017 compared to the year prior, with 1,382 murders documented from JanuAry to OCTOBER -- A igure that ALREADY exceeds 2016’s total 1,258 homicides.
The state government ascribes the rise in violence to power struggles between crime gangs involved in drug smuggling, illegal immigration from Central America and the theft of fuel from pipelines.
Around 190,000 people have been killed in Mexico since 2006, when the government launched a military campaign on the drugs cartels. The numbers do not show how many of the victims were linked to crime groups.
Meanwhile, in a separate violent incident in Mexico City a 12-year-old girl was killed after an assailant attacked her and raped her two young sisters in their home in the northern Mexico border city of Ciudad Juarez.
THE prosecutor’s OFICE In CHIHUAHUA state says girl died of strangulation.
THE OFICE DID not GIVE THE younger girls’ ages, but local news media said they were 10 and 11.
THE OFICE SAID FRIDAY THE Assailant is being sought, but did not say IF HE HAD BEEN IDENTIIED. THE Attack occurred Wednesday in a low-income neighborhood on the city’s west side, near a desert area where the bodies of numerous young women were found dumped in the 1990s.