A candidate for mayor and three of her supporters were murdered on Sunday during a campaign event in Texistepec, Veracruz, state authorities said.

Morena and Green Party mayoral candidate Yesenia Lara Gutiérrez and her supporters were participating in a campaign procession through the streets of Texistepec, a town and municipality in the south of Veracruz, when gunfire broke out. Three other people were wounded in the armed attack.

In a video Lara was live streaming to her Facebook account, around 20 gunshots can be heard ringing out. The newspaper Reforma reported that the candidate was greeting “women with children in their arms” when the gunfire began.

State Governor Rocío Nahle and the Veracruz Attorney General’s Office (FGE) announced the murder of the mayoral candidate and three other people on social media.

“No office or position is worth a person’s life. We’re going to arrest those responsible for this cowardly murder of the candidate and Morena supporters in Texistepec; 4 people dead and 3 wounded. I’ve instructed the @FGE_Veracruz and police not to stop until they find [the culprits],” the Morena party governor wrote on X. 

The FGE said that three men were killed in addition to Lara, who was vying to win the mayorship of Texistepec in an election that will be held June 1, the same day that citizens across Mexico will elect judges in the country’s first-ever judicial elections.

In a post to X and Facebook just before midnight Sunday, the Attorney General’s Office said that the three wounded people were receiving medical care. It said it was investigating the crime.

Media reports and the FGE statement indicate that the attack was perpetrated by at least two people. No specific motive for the crime was immediately disclosed. President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Monday morning that she was unaware of the motivation for the attack.

Lara, 49, was the wife of the late Enrique Argüelles, a former councilor in Texistepec who was murdered in 2022. In a post to her Facebook page on Sunday morning, she wrote that “the strength of our young people is the vitality that motivates me to keep walking day by day.”

The murder of the candidate came 12 days after Germán Anuar Valencia, Morena’s mayoral candidate in the northern Veracruz municipality of Coxquihui, was shot dead.

New mayors will be elected in all 212 municipalities of Veracruz on June 1.

Political violence a major problem in Mexico 

Attacks on politicians and political candidates occur with alarming frequency in Mexico. The majority of the victims are elected or aspiring officials at the municipal level, such as mayors, councilors and mayoral candidates.

Morena mayoral candidate in Celaya murdered at campaign event

According to Mexico City-based consultancy firm Integralia, there were 104 “incidents of political violence,” including 50 homicides, in the first quarter of 2025. While still high, the 104 incidents represented a 59.2% decline compared to the first quarter of last year, Integralia said in a report.

The higher number of incidents of political violence in the first three months of 2024 came before Mexicans elected thousands of municipal, state and federal officials at elections on June 2.

Integralia said that 81.7% of the victims of political violence in the first quarter of this year were current or former municipal officials, or people aspiring to positions at the municipal level.

The high number of incidents of political violence at the municipal level is testament to “the institutional fragility of that level of government, particularly in the face of the infiltration efforts of organized crime,” Integralia said.

The consultancy firm reported that the central Mexican state of Morelos recorded more incidents of political violence than any other entity in the first quarter of 2025, with a total of 17. Veracruz was second with 13 incidents of political violence, followed by Oaxaca (12), Puebla (11) and Guerrero (9).

The party whose officials and aspiring officials suffered the highest number of incidents of political violence in the first quarter of the year was Morena, which is in office at the federal level, in a majority of Mexican states and in more than 1,000 municipalities.

Integralia said that the prevalence of attacks against Morena party politicians is explained “in part” by the high “concentration of positions of popular election that Morena occupies.”

With reports from Reforma, Aristegui Noticias, CBS News and El Financiero