Slaying of Mexico mayor sends message

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Until he was gunned down over the weekend, Salvador Vergara Cruz was a man of some influence with a promising future in his political party. Mayor of an important resort town outside Mexico City, and a close confidant of his state’s governor, Vergara apparently felt sufficiently at ease to travel without a specially assigned team of bodyguards despite receiving death threats from purported drug lords, reports Tracy Wilkinson.

The 34-year-old Vergara was killed by hooded assassins armed with semiautomatic rifles as he drove with other officials toward his home city of Ixtapan de la Sal on Saturday afternoon.

The killing of a sitting elected official may turn out to be one of the more significant political slayings in Mexico’s raging drug war, not so much because of who he was as for what his death represented.

Prosecutors in the state of Mexico say Vergara was killed because he refused to allow drug gangs to move into and operate freely in his city, along a transit route for drugs into the nation’s capital.

Click here to read more about the killing of a Mexican mayor. Go here for more posts on Mexico and here for our ‘Mexico Under Siege’ special report.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City