Tag: Assassination

By the end of March, 67 politicians had been slain since the electoral process kicked off last September. As of Tuesday, the figure was 78, according to a report published by the University of the Americas Puebla (UDLAP) and the risk analysis firm Etellekt. There have been 203 acts of aggression against politicians since September, 173 of which were armed attacks. The third edition of the report, entitled Political Violence Mexico, also counted, for the first time, 30 attacks against candidates’ relatives. With 29 of its members killed so far this electoral season, the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) tops the list as the most targeted political party. The aggression has been reported in more than 160 municipalities in 29 states, noted the report, adding that two-thirds of all assassinations were recorded during the pre-campaign period. Guerrero topped the list of the most dangerous states for politicians with 18 assassinations. In Guerrero, criminal elements are seeking to maintain control of opium poppy production while in the center of the country the attraction is petroleum and freight carried by cargo trucks. In fact, the figure is the total for September through March. Sponsored

Fifty years ago, on the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he was running for the presidency of the United States. “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies,” said Kennedy, who four years earlier had been elected U.S. senator from New York. For a brief period it seemed Bobby was the only one who could bring a deeply divided America together. Assassinations, riots, war, protests. In American Pastoral, his beautiful, chaotic novel about how these events tore apart the seemingly perfect marriage of an Irish American beauty queen and a Jewish American striver, Philip Roth refers to 1968 as the high-water mark of “the indigenous America berserk.” And Irish Americans -- from Bobby Kennedy to blue collar workers - -were central players. On the national stage, two Irish Americans -- Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy -- began the year as political outsiders, challenging the Vietnam War policy of President Lyndon Johnson, who would eventually shock the world by not even running for re-election. But out in the working class ethnic neighborhoods of New York and Boston and Chicago an anger was bubbling. Consider a small moment from Chris Mathews' recent book Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. Kennedy was campaigning in Manhattan. Just five months after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, it was Richard Nixon who skillfully figured out how to tap into this anger, and move into the White House.