translated from Spanish: Armed groups kidnapped 9 PRI and Morena electoral operators in Sinaloa

Between Saturday, June 5, and Sunday, June 6, at least nine electoral operators from the PRI and Morena were kidnapped in different municipalities of Sinaloa. The figure could rise, according to information from the Attorney General’s Office (FGE), which also added that all were released and located alive and that they are investigating whether these events were to pressure the victims and force them to suspend operations prepared for election day.
One of these cases even caused the PRI candidate for mayor of Badiraguato, Guadalupe Iribe Gascon, to decide to leave the race on 6 June, because among the victims was her brother, who hours later was released, as documented by Noroeste.
As a reason for the events, the local authorities only initiated seven investigation files, which correspond only to the acts committed against the PRI operators.

So far Morena has not filed a complaint and it was reported that they are barely gathering information to determine if in the next few hours they will file the corresponding complaints for kidnapping their militants.
According to Espejo magazine, the head of the agency, Cristobal Castaneda, who is the coordinator of the state security board, revealed that at least 11 people were kidnapped on Saturday, and another 18 on Sunday, for a total of 29 victims.
In the case of the brother of the PRI candidate for mayor of Badiraguato, Guadalupe Iribe Gascon, he was found alive on Sunday night with signs of blows to the body and a threatening message.

On Sunday, another similar incident was reported to have occurred against Jose Alberto Salas, secretary of organization of the state PRI, in Culiacan. That same day, in Guasave, Morena Councilwoman Martha Yolanda Dagnino Camacho was deprived of her liberty and was also released hours later.
Federal authorities were already aware of the interference that organized crime could have in the elections in the state, where the Sinaloa cartels and the Beltran Leyva are waged.
The Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC) established that in Sinaloa – as well as in six other entities – there was “a greater risk that candidates will be co-opted by crime,” according to an official report presented on March 4 by the head of the agency, Rosa Icela Rodríguez.
In addition to the kidnappings, state authorities recorded the theft and destruction of electoral materials. After the closing of the vote, the Electoral Institute of the State of Sinaloa (IEES) reported that 23 polling stations were “vandalized” in Ahome and Guasave. On Thursday, the LOCAL BOARD of the INE reported that armed groups stole 51 ballot boxes from districts 1 (of the municipality of El Fuerte), 3 and 4 (both located in Los Mochis). The four municipalities where the events occurred are located in the northern region of the state.
The FGE confirmed to this media outlet that 15 investigation files related to electoral crimes were initiated.
Both the PRI and Morena made mutual accusations that one party or another was behind the attacks. But the fact that among the victims of disappearance were militants from both political institutes, as well as the actual figures from the vote, show that both parties were affected.
In an interview, the Morenist candidate, Ruben Rocha — who is emerging as a virtual winner of the gubernatorial election — accused that historically the tricolor has had ties to organized crime in the state. This media outlet insisted on requests for interviews with the state leaders of the PRI and the PAN, Jesus Valdes Palazuelos and Juan Carlos Estrada, respectively, but, until the close of this edition, they had not accepted the request.
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On the night of 6 June, after the polls closed, the PRI-PAN-PRD gubernatorial candidate, Mario Zamora, acknowledged that the vote did not favor him, but suggested that the multiple attacks reported throughout the day had had a direct beneficiary: Morena. The also senator on leave called for the release of persons deprived of liberty related to his party.
“The election is over, the result you were apparently waiting for has already been obtained, please return them; they’re good men and women who were just trying to do their job,” the candidate declared, according to Northwest.
His opponent and virtual winner of the election, Morenist Senator Ruben Rocha, rejected the accusations and considered that, in fact, his party had been the main target of the attacks, especially in the municipalities of Ahome and Sinaloa, where, he said, armed men hovered around the polling booths.to intimidate voters.
“They attacked above all our comrades both in Ahome and in the municipality of Sinaloa. Where it got more serious, it was attacked against our comrades and against the (voting) trend that we had across the state, particularly in those places,” he said in an interview. “There was that intention, that goal of trying to make people as little as possible to vote; everyone knew that the more they went to vote, the more they were going to favor Morena, as expressed in the result of the election, and that was sung with the polls that were there.”
According to the PREP, in the gubernatorial election, Rocha Moya leads with 56.6% of the votes cast, while his opponent, Zamora, won 32.6% of the vote.
In the 2018 election, Morena and his allies won 7 of the 18 municipalities, against 9 of the PRI and its allies (the remaining 2 were for the PAN and the local PAS). This time, the Morenist alliance won in 15 mayoralties, while the PRI only retained its dominance in the municipality of Sinaloa (the remaining two municipalities went to the PT and Encuentro Solidario, which now did not ally with Morena).
For candidate Rocha Moya, the acts of intimidating organized crime were the reason why his party failed to snatch the mayor’s office of Sinaloa from the tricolor.
“In Sinaloa there was a lot of scare in the surroundings of the polling stations and there they did impact us, so much so that, according to the count, it is the only point where we lost the election, precisely because there was too much concentration of violence against us, it is the only municipality that we lose with the PRI. In Ahome we won despite (the violence), although the margin was greatly reduced,” he said.
The Morenist standard-bearer was told that, in contrast, in Badiraguato — where PRI[Institutional Revolutionary Party]member Guadalupe Iribe resigned from the race following her brother’s kidnapping — the tricolor lost control of the mayor’s office.
And the example I give you of Sinaloa, is it worth it? Or do you only register the one in Badiraguato? Rocha claimed.
The morenista said that, although the kidnapping of Iribe’s relative was regrettable and condemnable, in Badiraguato “there was not the violence that took place in the municipality of Sinaloa and in Ahome, and that was against us (…) we were mostly affected by the acts of violence.”
Rocha denied that the attacks had been to Morena’s benefit and accused the PRI of being the historical architect of the pacts with crime.
“It’s been the dirty campaign they’ve been running for a while. With whom crime has worked all its life is with the PRI, with whom else do you have a way of agreeing? Where are we going to have that ancestral antecedent that the PRI governments have, particularly in this (northern) part of Sinaloa and the Pacific? That is what is credible. With whom have you gotten on with? With them. It’s not us. It is totally false any artifice they want to put together that favored us,” he said.
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Original source in Spanish

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