(London Daily Mail) Magda Rubio had just launched her campaign for mayor of a small city in northern Mexico, when a chilling voice came through her cell phone. ‘Drop out,’ the caller warned, ‘or be killed.’
It was the first of four death threats Rubio said she has received since January from the same well-spoken, anonymous man. She has stayed in the race in Guachochi, located in a mountainous region of the Chihuahua state that is a key route for heroin trafficking. But two armed body guards now follow her round the clock.
‘At 2am, you start to get scared, and you say, “something bad is going on here”,’ she said.
An explosion of political assassinations in Mexico has cast a pall over nationwide elections slated for July 1, when voters will choose their next president and fill a slew of down-ballot posts.
