Drug trafficking big issue in Mexico's midterm election (News Feature)

Mexico City - Drug trafficking is a major player in Sunday's midterm legislative election in Mexico, with drug cartels directly supporting some candidates and other candidates exploiting the bloody fight against the drug cartels to make political gains. On Sunday, 77.5 million Mexicans will be called upon to elect 500 members of the lower house of the federal Congress. The election will also select six state governors, 552 mayors and 434 local legislators in 11 of Mexico's 32 states. The influence of the drug gangs in the election has so far been indirect, and has been focused on the local political sphere. There have been, for example, pressure moves in favour of candidates to whom the cartels have offered financial support, protection and guarantees of peace in exchange for being allowed to operate without threat of prosecution. The daily Excelsior cited the Interior Ministry and the Attorney General's Office Friday as saying that 16 candidates to seats in the federal Congress have ties to organized crime. If they are elected, these people - belonging to four parties across six states - would be immune from prosecution for three years. The sources in the Excelsior story declined to identify the 16 candidates by name, but said they were all front-runners in the race for a Congress seat in their constituencies. Earlier this month, Mauricio Fernandez Garza, a mayoral candidate in the northeastern state of Nuevo Leon, told potential voters that the town 'is at peace - compared with the way the metropolitan area is starting to deteriorate - because here the Beltran Leyvas are in control.' The town in question is part of the metropolitan area of the northeastern state Nuevo Leon, whose capital is Monterrey. It is home to the families of the Beltran Leyva brothers, the leaders of one of the strongest Mexican drug cartels, according to the mayor. During the same remarks, Fernandez Garza, a member of Mexican President Felipe Calderon's National Action Party (PAN,) stressed that the situation should be kept up. In parallel events, Michoacan Governor Leonel Godoy, of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), revealed that when he took office in February 2008 he told the Army that drug bosses had called a meeting of 85 mayors elected in the same election. The meeting - which was eventually only attended by 16 mayors - was meant to reassure the drug gangs that they would enjoy protection from the new authorities. 'Mexican mafias control 50 to 60 per cent of the country's municipal governments,' said researcher Eduardo Buscaglia, an adviser to the United Nations. The authorities recently carried out raids in the PAN-governed state of Morelos and in Michoacan, ruled by the PRD. In Morelos, members of the Beltran Leyva cartel were arrested, alongside the state Public Security minister and his counterpart from state capital Cuernavaca. Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said the Beltran Leyva brothers 'found a certain level of protection in institutions, in people who were active within public security institutions.' In Michoacan - Calderon's native state - 10 mayors were arrested over their ties with drug trafficking, although two of them were later released. Twenty other officials at different levels of government were also arrested, although it was not known whether they were linked to the meeting that Godoy had reported. At the same time, politicians were featuring in their campaigns varying points of view on the war against drug trafficking at the federal level led by Calderon since he entered office. Calderon has deployed thousands of federal police and military officers to fight the drug gangs in many states across the country. Drug-related violence claimed 6,290 lives in Mexico in 2008, and the count by June 15 this year was already up to 2,926. The small Social Democratic Party was asking voters if they were willing to vote for 'those who solve everything with the bullet' and claimed it had other means to engage in politics. PAN, in turn, asked voters for support to brace Calderon's policy against the drug gangs. The opposition accused the ruling party of wanting to make political use of the fight against crime.