On April 1, 2024, Bertha Gisela Gaytán stood at a campaign rally in Celaya, a city in Guanajuato torn apart by a cartel turf war. She was running for mayor, promising to fix the roads and rein in the violence. Weeks earlier, she had formally asked federal authorities for protection. She never heard back. That afternoon, gunmen opened fire on the rally, killing her and wounding three people beside her. Voters never got to cast a ballot for her. Gaytán’s death is not an isolated tragedy. It is the operating logic of Mexican municipal politics.

Here is my argument: Mexico’s local democracy is being hollowed out because criminal groups, not voters, now decide who gets to run. On paper, Mexico looks democratic. On the ground, in many towns, it isn’t. You can vote for mayor. You just can’t vote against the cartel’s pick.

The Timeline of Democratic Erosion

Most definitions treat democratic erosion as state-led. Mexico shows another route. Stealth authoritarians, as Varol describes them, hollow out democracy with lawyers and electoral laws. Cartels use older tools: bribes, intimidation, bullets.

According to historical tracking from V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Dataset, Mexico’s Electoral Democracy Index reached an all-time high of approximately 0.72 (on a 0-to-1 scale) in 2000, marked by the historic end of seven decades of single-party rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). However, this trajectory reversed sharply after 2006, driven by the massive expansion of illicit drug trafficking networks and the federal government’s decision to launch a militarized “War on Drugs” against these cartels. Instead of eliminating criminal syndicates, this militarized anti-cartel offensive fragmented them into aggressive territorial factions that targeted municipal governments to secure local immunity and control illicit revenues.

Where Mexico stands today reflects this two-decade decline: Freedom House Freedom in the World Report currently rates Mexico at an aggregate score of 60 out of 100, classifying it as only “Partly Free,” while V-Dem indices reflect a persistent slump in subnational electoral integrity.

This decline highlights a broader structural phenomenon across Latin America. As detailed in recent research published in Frontiers in Political Science, electoral and political violence acts as a primary catalyst for democratic erosion not by disrupting voting day, but by distorting the entire path into politics. The study demonstrates that sustained criminal violence systematically restricts the “candidate supply”—discouraging qualified civil actors from entering public life and forcing local political parties to self-censor their nominations. In Mexico’s subnational context, this mechanism creates a severe structural paradox: while the country maintains competitive presidential elections at the national level today, its local democracy has eroded into criminal capture, where candidate selection and electoral contestation are dictated by cartel coercion long before ballots are cast.

Why This Should Worry You

Democracy requires more than a ballot box. If cartel violence purges the ballot before election day, the vote itself becomes a hollow ritual. Political scientists have names for what’s at stake. Robert Dahl said democracy needs contestation: those in power can lose, and rivals are free to compete for votes. Tilly added that citizens need protection from arbitrary action by state and non-state actors. When cartels pick the candidates, both fail. Voters keep the ballot but lose vertical accountability, the power to reward or punish their leaders.

The Illusion of National Success

Mexico recently elected its first female president in a high-turnout vote and federal institutions worked smoothly. Skeptics say that proves Mexican democracy is fine. They are looking at the wrong level.

Political scientist Edward Gibson calls this “subnational authoritarianism”—national democracy coexisting with local autocracy. Most of what shapes daily life from policing to roads to budgets, is decided locally. A smooth presidential race doesn’t undo a mayoral race settled by a death threat months earlier. Gaytán wasn’t killed in 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.

The Violence Is Scheduled.

Cartel violence follows the election calendar. Data Cívica’s Votar Entre Balas Project and the ACLED Electoral Violence Press Release documented the pattern: violence spikes before elections and drops afterward. Non-election years like 2026 record virtually zero candidate assassinations, whereas the 2024 general election cycle was the bloodiest on record, with over 130 violent attacks against political figures. Of those victims, 34 were murdered, 40 survived attacks, 32 received threats, 10 candidates were kidnapped, and 14 armed attacks occurred 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 need the presidency. They need highways, ports, and municipal budgets, and those run through city hall, not the national palace.

To get it, they use a doctrine that’s become a slogan: 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 candidates, Gaytán among them, 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 reach the polls, the real filtering is done.

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

In parts of Guerrero, Michoacán, and Chiapas, cartels aren’t influencing local government from the shadows — they’re functioning as the government. For instance, in Michoacán’s avocado heartland, they impose “informal taxes” on farmers and packing facilities, and enforce them more ruthlessly than the official tax office. They settle disputes that never reach a courtroom. They repair roads and fund town festivals, the favors a mayor’s office once handed out. None of it comes with an election. The violence around campaign isn’t chaos layered on top of system — it’s how the system protects itself.

In research published in the Journal of Democracy, political scientist Andreas Schedler terms this “criminal subversion”— violence that doesn’t destroy electoral institutions but captures them from within. This structural erosion perfectly illustrates political theorist Guillermo O’Donnell’s foundational concept of “brown areas”: pockets inside a democratic country where the law exists on paper but stops working in practice. In Mexico’s brown areas, citizens still cast ballots, but they just choose among figureheads pre-approved by criminal syndicates.

Reclaiming Subnational Democracy

Sending soldiers to guard polling stations treats the symptom. By election day, the candidates who mattered have already been threatened, bought off or killed. The real fight happens months earlier, in the stretch of the campaign nobody is watching, the stretch Gaytán didn’t survive. Fixing it means going after the financial networks that let cartels run towns, and giving the state, not armed groups, authority over who may run. It also means something more basic: answering a protection request before the rally, not after the funeral.

Until then, Mexican elections will keep producing winners voters never really chose. 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.