Put frankly, yes, Mexico is still a democracy in an important sense. Citizens vote, opposition parties compete, and political power changes hands. In June 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum won the presidency with nearly 60 percent of the vote. But beneath the ballot box, while millions of Mexicans exercised their right to vote, organized criminal groups used threats and violence to influence who could run for office and how local governments operated. 

During the 2023–2024 electoral cycle, 37 political candidates were assassinated, according to Freedom House’s 2025 report on Mexico. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) also documented extensive violence against candidates, their supporters, and their relatives. More than 80 percent of the incidents targeting candidates or their associates involved local-level races. At least 553 candidates requested state protection after receiving threats, while others withdrew from races (ACLED’s analysis of the 2024 elections). 

These events raise a question that goes beyond just public safety: Can a country hold democratic elections if criminal groups can influence who can compete for office? 

Cartel violence poses a threat to Mexican democracy by limiting who can safely run for office and how freely elected officials can govern, especially at the local level. Elections can continue even as criminal groups interfere with the political process. Through threats and intimidation, cartels can narrow voters’ choices before election day and pressure officials after they take office. If this pattern holds, municipalities with greater criminal interference should show evidence of reduced candidate competition, threats against officeholders, or less government autonomy, even as voter turnout remains relatively stable. But this doesn’t mean every election affected by cartel violence is illegitimate. It emphasizes that holding elections is not the same as ensuring that political competition is genuinely free. 

Przeworski, Manin, and Stokes explain that elections are a central mechanism of democratic accountability. Citizens choose representatives and can punish politicians who fail to serve their interests. But elections only work as intended when citizens have meaningful choices and can hold their representatives responsible. 

Cartel violence complicates both conditions. When criminal organizations threaten candidates or assassinate political figures, they can discourage people from entering politics in the first place. They may also pressure elected officials to protect criminal activities, direct public resources toward particular interests, or appoint officials who will cooperate with them. A ballot may still exist, but the available candidates may already have been shaped by threats. Similarly, a mayor may have won a legitimate election but lack the freedom to make independent decisions afterward. 

Unlike ordinary public safety problems, this violence can directly affect who competes for political power and whether elected officials can make decisions without criminal interference. Marco Alcocer and Megan Erickson found that violence against politicians was strongly associated with cartel capacity and conflicts against local officials. This suggests that threats to local democracy are also connected to competition between criminal groups and their efforts to obtain influence over local authorities. 

Research by Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero and Nayely Iturbe supports this concern. Their 2024 study found that organized criminal groups target candidates and local officials partly to influence candidate selection and gain control over local governments. The authors identify political violence as a strategy for securing access to valuable local resources and retaliating against government crackdowns. 

Weitz-Shapiro and Winters’ research on corruption in Brazil offers another way to understand Mexico’s democratic challenges. Their study examines how voters respond to corruption allegations and finds that the credibility of the information source influences whether voters punish politicians. Electoral accountability depends both on the voters’ willingness to hold leaders accountable and on their access to credible information about those leaders and the overall policies. 

In Mexico, however, citizens face a problem that extends beyond evaluating competing claims. In some communities, criminal groups can influence what local officials, journalists, and residents feel safe saying publicly. Since 2006, 169 journalists in Mexico have been killed, with organized crime and corruption identified as major drivers of these killings. Many of them were local journalists who had received threats leading up to their deaths, and many of the victims were denied protection after reporting them. These murders do more than silence individual reporters. They can discourage other journalists from investigating criminal activity, exposing corruption, or examining ties between public officials and organized crime groups. When local reporting is suppressed, communities lose an important source of information about the people governing them. 

This creates a problem for democratic accountability. Officials can then evade scrutiny and make it harder for voters to distinguish between decisions made under coercion. With this, citizens may struggle to determine whether an official is cooperating with criminal groups, failing to protect residents, or simply operating under severe threats. Without reliable information, voters have a harder time deciding whom to reward or punish. 

Cartel violence can create a public safety crisis without necessarily undermining the legitimacy of election results. Violence alone doesn’t prove that cartels control every election or elected official, and Gutiérrez-Romero and Iturbe’s findings suggest that political assassinations do not necessarily prevent citizens from voting. However, stable turnout does not mean political competition is free. Even when citizens continue voting and election results remain legitimate, threats could discourage candidates from running or pressure elected officials to act in criminal groups’ interests. 

Gutiérrez-Romero and Iturbe found that political assassinations had a negligible effect on voter turnout in their study. This complicates the assumption that violence necessarily causes citizens to stop participating. Instead, citizens may continue voting even when their choices are constrained. Turnout measures whether people vote, not whether candidates can compete safely or elected officials can govern freely. Democratic resilience also depends on whether institutions can withstand threats to their authority. 

Mexico shows why democracy is about far more than just holding elections. People still vote, opposition candidates still run, and official results may well be legitimate, yet cartel violence quietly dictates who can safely run for office, what leaders can actually accomplish, and what information reaches voters. Cartels don’t instantly render every affected election meaningless, but they do make us ask: how free is political competition, and can voters really hold leaders accountable when violence pulls the strings?

Democracy requires more than just participation. It requires meaningful choices and accountable leadership. If candidates withdraw because of threats or elected officials change their decisions to avoid criminal retaliation, elections may continue without providing the same level of accountability. Researchers should therefore examine turnout alongside evidence of candidate withdrawals, uncontested races, threats against officeholders, and possible criminal influence over local government. These indicators would help determine whether cartel violence is merely creating insecurity or is also restricting democratic competition.

To see how this actually plays out, we need to look at the local level. By comparing municipalities with high and low rates of criminal violence, researchers can trace whether threats lead to candidate withdrawals, uncontested races, or local officials taking orders from cartels. If these trends exist even in places where voter turnout holds steady, it proves that turnout alone is a poor proxy for democratic health. Cartels don’t have to stop people from voting to strip an election of its meaning.

Works Cited

Alcocer, Marco, and Erickson, Megan. 2026. “The Transformation of Mexican Cartels and Violence Against Government Officials.” Journal of Peace Research. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopres/xjag076.

Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). 2024. “Five Key Takeaways from the 2024 Elections in Mexico.” ACLED, https://acleddata.com/report/five-key-takeaways-2024-elections-mexico.  

Berg, Ryan C., and Bledsoe, Rubi. 2024. “Claudia Sheinbaum: The Most Powerful Woman in the World?” Center for Strategic and International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/claudia-sheinbaum-most-powerful-woman-world.

Freedom House. 2025. “Mexico: Freedom in the World 2025 Country Report.” Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/country/mexico/freedom-world/2025. 

Gutiérrez-Romero, Roxana, and Iturbe, Nayely. 2024. “Causes and Electoral Consequences of Political Assassinations: The Role of Organized Crime in Mexico.” Political Geography, vol. 115, article 103206, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103206. 

Przeworski, Adam, Stokes, Susan C., and Manin, Bernard (Eds.). 1999. Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/democracy-accountability-and-representation/14785A2D4EE1DDFBA595CE810C51F2CA. 

Reporters Without Borders. 2026. “Mexico Sees Longest-Running Wave of Journalists Murdered in Peacetime, 169 Killed in 20 Years.” Reporters Without Borders. https://rsf.org/en/mexico-sees-longest-running-wave-journalists-murdered-peacetime-169-killed-20-years. 

Weitz-Shapiro, Rebecca, and Winters, Matthew. S. 2017. “Can Citizens Discern? Information Credibility, Political Sophistication, and the Punishment of Corruption in Brazil.” The Journal of Politics, 79(1), 60-74. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/687287.