As the government of Zeferino Torreblanca nears its end in Acapulco, La Jornada's correspondent in Guerrero state sums up the total death toll of perredistas, or members of the leftwing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), murdered during his government: 46. The most prominent fatality is clearly Armando Chavarría Barrera, assassinated in August 2009, who was a very likely gubernatorial candidate to succeed Zeferino (For more on Chavarría's murder, see this post). Yet the range of murdered activists include everything from former mayors to prominent peasant and social leaders, to groups of voters - for the 2009 federal elections, in the municipality of Coahuayutla, close to Michoacán and in the Costa Grande, 12 indigenous purépecha identified with the PRD were gunned down on their way to vote.
The tragic irony is of course that Guerrero's governor Torreblanca was until recently identified as a PRD governor. While he recently loudly denounced the party for the simple reason that the PRD, moreover well aware of Torreblanca's unpopularity within the party and with voters as a whole, refused to allow him to impose his own candidate to succeed him.
It would not be prudent to signal Torreblanca as the architect behind the PRD murders - I personally do not believe he had anything to do with any of them, and for sure no evidence has surfaced to indicate this. Yet the ineptitude of Torreblanca's police and prosecutorial appointments have been appalling, as the murders continued unabated and unresolved (including Chavarría's), while the governor seemed more busy with sending police forces to repress street demonstrations by social forces protesting his government's ineptitude and general indifference to the plight of social activists, constantly harassed and frequently murdered, in the state of Guerrero.
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