Third Mexican midterm election candidate murdered

An armed group has attacked an election rally in the troubled Mexican state of Michoacan, shooting dead a mayoral contender in the June 7 midterm vote - the third candidate to be gunned down by organised crime groups during the campaign.

The grisly string of murders at the hands of the organised crime gangs vying for territorial control starkly illustrates how parts of Mexico remain a tinderbox.

Enrique Hernandez, a candidate with the opposition Morena party and former leader of a local "self-defence" militia group that had taken the law into its own hands to fight the extortion and brutality of the Knights Templar cartel, died en route to hospital on Thursday night after the attack on his election rally.

Videos showing his body covered by a white sheet, lying on a kerb outside a shop as locals milled past, was posted on social media.

His death follows that of Ulises Fabian Quiroz, a mayoral candidate from the alliance between the ruling Institutional Revolutionary party and the Green party in the state of Guerrero, who was gunned down en route to an election rally on May 1.

In March Aide Nava Gonzalez, who had been running for mayor in another town in Guerrero for the opposition Democratic Revolutionary party (PRD), was shot dead and beheaded, her body draped with a "narcomanta" - a message on a sheet - from the Los Rojos gang, promising the same fate to other uncooperative politicians.

Luis Walton Aburto, a candidate for governor of Guerrero from the Citizens' Movement party, and Silvia Romero, a former Guerrero state education minister campaigning for the state legislature for the PRD, were both kidnapped recently but were released unhurt.

Mexicans vote on June 7 to elect 500 federal deputies, 17 state legislatures, nine governors - including those of Michoacan and Guerrero - and more than 300 mayors in what President Enrique Pena Nieto has admitted will be a referendum on his rule.

The president had been at pains to portray a reforming, dynamic Mexico that is open for business to banish the memory of his predecessor's failed "war on drugs", in which a crackdown on cartels cost as many as 100,000 lives.

But in September the old Mexico of arbitrary violence, drug lords, corrupt politicians and feeble institutions reared its head after 43 students in Guerrero were kidnapped and handed over to criminals, who are believed to have murdered them. The killings sparked months of protests across the country.

The government has sent federal troops and police to quell hotspots, and has scored a string of successes in capturing top cartel leaders. But as Carlos Cardenas at IHS, a consultancy, notes: "The government doesn't seem to be ready enough to handle the subsequent fragmentation" that has led to turf wars flaring in places such as Guerrero.

In Chilapa, where Mr Quiroz was campaigning for mayor, an armed group - some wearing black balaclavas and straw hats - took over the town in recent days. They finally agreed on Thursday to withdraw but said they would return if the authorities did not capture the head of the Los Rojos gang within one week.

Relatives of the 43 students have urged authorities to delay the elections in Guerrero, saying the conditions are not guaranteed, but the government has so far vowed to go ahead.

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