MEXICO CITY_The hit men arrived by motorcycle at noon, stepped into the Toreo Restaurant and, without uttering a word, opened fire on Antonia Jaimes Moctezuma.
Then they sped away, their mission completed.
Jaimes was the restaurant's owner and a candidate for a state congressional seat. Her killing Feb. 21 in the city of Chilapa, in Mexico's violence-plagued Guerrero state, is among more than two dozen assassinations of candidates running for office in July.
"The situation of insecurity is very grave here," said her husband, Moises Acevedo. "But not only in Chilapa. They're killing candidates all over the country."
Authorities have confirmed that at least 30 candidates have been killed, said Alfonso Navarrete, Mexico's interior secretary. Some reports indicate the toll since last year may be almost twice as high.
The killings _ mostly of local candidates in provincial areas far from the Mexican capital _ form a chilling backdrop to the July 1 elections, which include races for president, Congress and local offices across the country. More than 3,000 offices are to be filled in the elections, the most ever on a single day.
The slain candidates represented a range of political affiliations and movements, suggesting that the killings are more about local power grabs and gang rivalries than national conflicts among parties. Most of the victims did not have security teams and public renown that offer some measure of protection for national and other high-profile office-seekers.
Most of the killings have attracted little attention from national news outlets, which are heavily focused on the presidential contenders, who appear daily on television.
Among the most recent victims is Aaron Varela Martinez, a mayoral candidate in Puebla state who was found shot to death March 1 in his vehicle outside the town of Santa Clara Ocoyucan. A lawyer, Varela was a member of the leftist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena.
His campaign promise was, "Not to lie, not to betray and not to rob."
Also last month, a Morena congressional candidate was shot on a street in the northern state of San Luis Potosi, but survived.
The attacks have generated profound concern here and abroad about the state of Mexican democracy.
"Mexico is suffering a risk in the legitimacy of its electoral processes," said Erubiel Tirado, a political scientist at Mexico's Iberoamerican University. "The question here is: Does the Mexican state really have the capacity to protect (candidates)? I believe that it doesn't."
The increase in political killings "is absolutely unacceptable in an electoral process," said Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States, which plans to send a team to observe Mexico's July voting.
"It's an average of one murder of a candidate every four or five days," he said in Madrid last month. "We are very worried."
Most cases remain unresolved. Motives remain murky, but many suspect both internal political disputes and gangs' determination to retain or assert control of the political system in their backyards.
The attacks, Navarrete said recently, are "very focused on some regions of the country," mostly in areas where organized crime often holds an insidious grip on power and federal law enforcement is stretched thin.
"That doesn't mean we are not taking steps," he said. "We could do it in a much better manner in an electoral year, be much more effective."
Among the hardest-hit places is the state of Guerrero, where political corruption is rampant and various factions compete for control of drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and other rackets. Mobsters routinely buy off local cops and politicians. Since the beginning of 2017, more than a dozen candidates have been reported killed in Guerrero.
The situation has become so volatile in Guerrero state that Roman Catholic Bishop Salvador Rangel Mendoza held an extraordinary Good Friday summit with cartel leaders pleading with them to stop the killings.
"I asked above all that they please try not to assassinate politicians," he told Milenio television, describing his conversation with the cartel leaders. "I also asked that they allow them (candidates) to conduct their campaigns freely."
Rangel, who was widely criticized by officials for his unorthodox approach to the crime leaders, said he was promised that that candidates would not be put on hit lists.
But Mexico's recent history suggests that such a promise may be illusory.
There were no assassinations of mayors in the 1980s and '90s, according to Justice in Mexico, a research project at the University of San Diego. But today, being a mayor or other regional lawmaker may be among the country's most dangerous jobs.
Mexico's National Association of Mayors recently reported that more than 100 mayors, mayors-elect and former mayors had been killed since 2006.
That was the year President Felipe Calderon, with U.S. backing, launched a new chapter in Mexico's war on drugs, including the so-called kingpin strategy that targeted cartel leaders, resulting in battles for fragmented drug-trafficking empires. In the past decade, there have been heightened intra-cartel clashes, shootouts between traffickers and government forces, and a surge in killings and "disappearances" of citizens.
In one particularly disquieting case, gunmen stormed the home of Gisela Mota shortly after dawn on Jan. 2, 2016, and executed her. Mota, the first female mayor of the city of Temixco in Morelos state, had campaigned on an anti-corruption pledge. It was her second day on the job.
In places like Morelos and Guerrero states, lawmakers must walk a fine line between official responsibilities and not upsetting violent criminal syndicates.
In areas where turf is disputed, politicians may be viewed as allies of one rival faction or another.
"An organized crime group may believe that a mayor is collaborating with another group and needs to be removed immediately," said Laura Calderon, program officer for Justice in Mexico. "Or organized crime may feel betrayed that a mayor refused to collaborate, so they need to delete the mayor from the picture."
Political killings may also serve as especially potent messages from the underworld.
In June 2014, the bullet-riddled body of a former councilwoman from San Miguel Totolapan in Guerrero state was found with a placard declaring: "This is going to happen to anyone who passes information to 'the fish.'"
The warning was from Los Tequileros, or the Tequila Drinkers, the dominant cartel in the area. "The fish" was the leader of a rival gang known as the Michoacan Family.
At the time of her assassination in Chilapa, Jaimes was running for the state congress under the banner of the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party.
The former city councilwoman understood the risks in Chilapa, a municipality of 120,000 that has become one of the country's most dangerous places. Two gangs _ the Reds and the Squirrels _ compete for surrounding terrain to grow poppies, the source of heroin smuggled to the United States.
Four days after Jaimes' killing, another candidate from Chilapa for the same congressional seat was found shot dead, stuffed alongside the body of a cousin in the trunk of a car left on a roadside. Dulce Rebaja Pedro, 28, was a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which holds Mexico's presidency, and headed regional committees on indigenous and Afro-Mexican affairs.
The violence in Chilapa has not let up.
Last Thursday, police found five bodies dumped along a highway. That evening, officials said, Chilapa's chief of security was riding in a police car along the same road when assailants opened fire and killed him.
The killings of the two state congressional candidates prompted at least one political aspirant from Chilapa to drop out of the same race.
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(Cecilia Sanchez contributed to this report.
