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TEHRAN, May 26 -An ex-member of an informal police force running for Mexico’s Senate is battling attacks labeling her a “kidnapper,” drawing attention to radical proposals by her ally, presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to end the drug war.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) - An ex-member of an informal police force running for Mexico’s Senate is battling attacks labeling her a “kidnapper,” drawing attention to radical proposals by her ally, presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, to end the drug war.
Nestora Salgado, who once ran a local community police force in the opium-rich southwestern state of Guerrero, said she had filed a lawsuit accusing ruling party presidential candidate Jose Antonio Meade of defamation after he called her a “kidnapper” in a televised debate.
The fight over whether Salgado is a heroic social activist or a criminal has put a spotlight on wider differences between presidential candidates over how to fix Mexico’s law and order problems, a major campaign theme ahead of the July 1 election.
Meade, third placed in polls, kept up pressure against his rival and Salgado in a Tweet on Friday, writing that as president he would follow the law without exception “while others opt for amnesty and form alliances with criminals.”
Lopez Obrador is exploring a plan for criminal amnesty to quell the country’s gang-related violence, on the heels of the bloodiest year in a war against drug gangs that has tallied up at least 200,000 homicides over the past decade.
The amnesty idea, along with his backing of Salgado and Jose Manuel Mireles Valverde, a former vigilante leader in the gang-terrorized state of Michoacan, is an attempt to secure votes from indigenous and other marginalized groups drawn into the drug war, said Javier Oliva Posada, a political science professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Salgado, 46, helped found her local policing group after witnessing the kidnapping and murder of a young taxi driver in 2012, part of the “autodefensa,” or self-defense, movement that grew a few years ago in towns with little trust in either armed drug gangs or the police forces sent to fight them.
Salgado’s group was considered legal under a Guerrero state law allowing self-policing in certain cases.
In 2013, Salgado, a dual U.S.-Mexico citizen, was arrested after the families of six teenage girls locally accused of dealing drugs said her group had kidnapped and extorted them.
Salgado spent two years and seven months in prison but a federal judge in 2016 acquitted her of all charges.
Source:Reuters
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