Death Toll in Postelection Fight Reaches 10 in Mexico City Area
The death toll from a postelection battle between rival political groups from Mexico’s ruling party rose to 10 Saturday, the state attorney general’s office said.
Dozens of police guarded the streets in Chimalhuacan, a slum on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Families held funerals for the victims a day after violence erupted between two militant groups allied with the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Gasoline bombs and bullets flew Friday as about 3,000 people gathered at the town plaza to inaugurate Chimalhuacan’s PRI mayor, Jesus Tolentino. Weeks before, his supporters had engaged in street battles during rallies for the mayor immediately after the election.
Police on Saturday were looking for Guadalupe Buendia--a PRI activist already reprimanded by the party for having strippers at a campaign rally--for allegedly urging her supporters to attack loyalists of Tolentino.
Buendia’s son had lost the party’s mayoral nomination to Tolentino, a member of the Antorcha movement, a radical pressure group aligned with the PRI.
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