The mayors of two rural Mexican communities in the states of Chiapas and Guerrero were murdered in one day. One of the mayors was murdered by a group of gunmen, while the other was beaten to death by protesters.
Ambrosio Soto, the mayor of Pungarabato, was murdered on Saturday night in a roadside ambush that also killed his driver. Two federal police officers that were providing security to Soto were seriously injured in the attack, information released by Guerrero’s law enforcement officials revealed. Soto, from Mexico’s Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD), has a history of calling out drug cartels that operate in the area between the states of Guerrero and Michoacán.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported, Guerrero is an area with lucrative drug trafficking routes that provide access to shipping ports as well as to rich farmlands for the production of narcotics. In recent years the area has become a hot bed of violence as various cartels continue to fight for control of the region.
The second murder took place on Saturday afternoon in San Juan Chamula in the state of Chiapas. In that murder, a group of protesters who barged into city hall complaining of unfair fees, Mexico’s Proceso reported. The protesters took Mayor Domingo Lopez Gonzalez out of his office along with a staffer named Narciso Lunes. A third person later identified Sebastian Lopez, a local judge, were dragged to the plaza square and were beaten to death.
A cell-phone video that was later uploaded to YouTube by an account called Alerta Chiapas purports to show the moment when the protesters drug out the politician. During the recording, the sound of celebratory gunfire can be heard in the background as the group of protesters continued to grow.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.