On April 1, 2024, Bertha Gisela Gaytán stood at a campaign rally in Celaya, a city in Guanajuato that’s been torn apart by a cartel turf war. She was running for mayor, promising to fix the roads and get the violence under control. Weeks before, she had asked the federal government for protection. She never heard back. That afternoon, gunmen opened fire on the rally and killed her, along with a city council candidate standing next to her. She never got to finish the campaign.

What happened to Gaytán isn’t some rare, tragic exception. It happens over and over, in towns most people outside Mexico have never heard of.

In Mexico, you can vote for mayor. You just can’t vote against the cartel’s pick. In large parts of the country, organized crime has quietly taken over the job of deciding who’s allowed to run for local office, who gets pressured into quitting, and who gets killed for refusing. On paper, Mexico looks democratic. On the ground, in a lot of towns, it isn’t.

You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the news. Mexico just elected its first female president. Turnout was high. The courts kept functioning. Nationally, everything looked fine. But once you zoom into the municipal level, that picture falls apart pretty fast.

Why This Should Worry You

Democracy isn’t only about whether people get to vote. It’s also about who they’re allowed to vote for. If the list of candidates has already been narrowed down by threats and assassinations before election day, the vote itself doesn’t mean much anymore. A country can hold clean elections, have working courts, and still not really be a democracy if criminal groups get to decide who’s allowed to lead.

That’s more or less where Mexico is right now, even if it doesn’t show up in the national numbers.

But the National Election Went Fine

Someone could reasonably push back here: Mexico just had a historic, mostly peaceful presidential election. Isn’t that what actually matters?

I don’t think so, or at least not entirely. Most of what actually affects people’s day-to-day lives gets decided locally, not nationally. A smooth presidential race doesn’t undo a mayoral race that was decided by a death threat months earlier. Gaytán wasn’t killed in some remote, forgotten village. She was killed in the middle of a real campaign, after asking for protection that never came. The national system can work exactly as intended while hundreds of local ones quietly don’t. That gap is kind of the whole point.

The Violence Isn’t Random. It’s Scheduled.

Cartel violence against politicians isn’t spread evenly across time. It follows the election calendar almost exactly. Data Cívica’s project https://votar-entre-balas.datacivica.org and ACLED Press Release https://acleddata.com/press/violence-during-2024-elections-exceeded-levels-recorded-during-2018-and-2021-elections-press have been tracking this for years, and the pattern holds up: violence spikes right before elections and basically disappears in between. 2026, a non-election year, saw almost no candidate assassinations. 2024, Mexico’s biggest election cycle in recent memory, was the deadliest on record, with 130 violent attacks on political figures. Of those victims, 34 were murdered, 40 survived attacks, 32 received threats,10 candidates were kidnapped, and 14 armed attacks during which the candidate survived but someone else died.

And it wasn’t presidential candidates getting targeted. More than 80% of the attacks hit local races — mayors, city council members, local police chiefs. Cartels don’t really need the presidency. They need control over highways, ports, and municipal budgets, and that kind of control runs through city hall, not the national palace.

To get it, they use a doctrine that’s become almost a slogan at this point: plata o plomo. Silver or lead. Take the bribe or take the bullet. In 2024 alone, at least 130 candidates were physically attacked or kidnapped. Over 550 — Gaytán included — asked for police protection just to keep campaigning. Hundreds more dropped out quietly, no public explanation given, because everyone already understood why. By the time voters actually show up to the polls, the real filtering has already happened.

Cartels Don’t Just Corrupt the State. They Replace It.

In parts of Guerrero, Michoacán, and Chiapas, cartels aren’t just influencing local government from the shadows — they’re functioning as local government. They collect informal taxes from businesses, often more reliably than the actual tax office does. They settle disputes that never make it to a courtroom. They pay for road repairs, fund town festivals, hand out the kind of favors a mayor’s office used to hand out. None of that comes with an election. The violence around campaign season isn’t random chaos on top of that system — it’s how that system protects itself.

In political research published by political scientist Andreas Schedler https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-criminal-subversion-of-mexican-democracy, he calls this “criminal subversion.” His point, roughly, is that this kind of violence doesn’t destroy elections so much as it captures them from the inside. It lines up with something political theorist Guillermo O’Donnell called “brown areas” — pockets of a country where the state’s laws technically exist but don’t really apply in practice. In Mexico’s brown areas, people still go vote. It just doesn’t change much, because the choice they’re making was narrowed down long before they got to the ballot box.

What Fixing This Actually Requires

Sending soldiers to guard polling stations on election day is dealing with the symptom, not the actual problem. By then, the candidates who mattered have already been threatened, bought off, or killed. The real fight happens months earlier, during the part of the campaign season nobody’s paying close attention to — the part Gaytán didn’t survive. Fixing this would mean going after the financial networks that let cartels run towns in the first place, and giving the state, not armed groups, the actual authority over who’s allowed to run for office. It would also mean something a lot more basic: answering a protection request before the rally, not after the funeral.

Until something like that happens, Mexican elections are going to keep producing winners who weren’t really chosen by voters. The ballots themselves are legal. The outcome, in a lot of towns, isn’t. Somewhere between the campaign trail and the ballot box, the actual election already happened, and most people never got a say in it.