“We want to block the elections because of the effects of the tyrannical relations between politicians and criminals. It would be giving power to the state to operate like criminals,” said Elmer Pacheco, leader of the Popular Guerrerense Movement (MPG), a group formed by radical teachers.
Sitting around a table in a dimly lit room, teachers and activists plot how to disrupt Sunday’s midterm elections in an impoverished southern Mexico town fed up with corrupt politicians.
The town of Tlapa is home to some of the fiercest protests held by radical teachers who have vowed to block the elections for federal Congress, governor and mayors in the state of Guerrero in anger at the authorities.
But unlike their peers in Guerrero, neighboring Oaxaca and Chiapas, the main gripe of Tlapa’s teachers is not President Enrique Pena Nieto’s controversial education reform.
In this town surrounded by mountains where criminals grow opium poppies and marijuana, they are tired of elected officials who collude with drug gangs. Walls are covered with graffiti calling for a boycott.
“No to narco-elections,” says a message spray-painted on a wall. Another says: “Don’t cast a secret vote for someone who will rob you publicly.”
[…]
