On a sunny spring day last year, a young attorney named Gisela Gaytán kicked off her campaign for mayor in this gritty Mexican city.
Under her blouse, she wore a ballistic vest.
Celaya had become the epicenter of a bloody cartel war, with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and a local police force that appeared powerless to stop it.
“We must recover the security that we so long for,” Gaytán, 38, wrote on social media before setting out that day.
As she shook hands at an event on the outskirts of town, a man approached, raised a gun, and shot her in the head.
After her funeral, where a priest lamented “a death caused by murderers who believe they control society,” local Morena party leaders picked a new candidate: Juan Miguel Ramírez Sánchez, a bespectacled former university rector who had worked on Gaytán’s campaign.
Ramírez believed that one of Celaya’s most urgent problems was its police, who, instead of fighting organized crime, appeared to be involved in it.
His son-in-law had been killed in a case that was still unsolved, and officers had demanded bribes and obstructed the investigation. Police misconduct was well documented: Local cops were prosecuted for abusing detainees and participating in kidnappings and even homicides.
Ramírez won the election. And in his first act as mayor, he fired 340 of the roughly 600 officers on the force. Then — as officials across Mexico have been doing for nearly two decades now — he called in federal troops.
Click here to read the complete, original article by Kate Linthicum on The Los Angeles Times
