OAXACA, Mexico: Teachers from a radical union ransacked National Electoral Institute offices in southern Mexico on Monday, stealing thousands of ballots in efforts to block Sunday’s midterm elections.
The protesters destroyed equipment and paperwork in 11 offices in the state of Oaxaca, the institute said in a statement, adding that nobody was injured.
Authorities said teachers also blocked access to a storage facility of state-run oil firm Pemex outside Oaxaca city.
Ruben Nunez, regional leader of the CNTE union, said the teachers started an “indefinite strike” to protest an education reform and “to boycott” the elections.
The protesters stole nearly 10,000 ballots in the municipality of Juchitan, the institute said, adding that it was already printing new ballots.
Another 13,000 ballots were burnt in Juchitan, but officials said those had previously been cancelled.
In the city of Oaxaca, the protesters broke into the institute’s state office, causing damage in the main meeting room, burning papers and shoving personnel, an elections spokesman said.
Teachers drove a car into the door of the institute’s local office in Juchitan before destroying furniture and setting a fire inside the facility, local police said.
Similar incidents took place in several other locations in Oaxaca, while a group of protesters seized a truck carrying election material in Huautla de Jimenez.
National Electoral Institute president Lorenzo Cordova told reporters in Mexico City that the organisation had closed most of its offices in Oaxaca in anticipation of trouble.
Cordova said Oaxaca and the neighbouring state of Guerrero are the areas “where we have had more problems to operate.”
The CNTE’s branch in Guerrero has also threatened to block elections there, along with Parents of 43 trainee teachers who were abducted by local police and allegedly killed by a drug gang.
The teachers are pressing on with their protest even though the federal government on Friday indefinitely suspended mandatory tests for educators, one of the key parts of the 2013 reform.
Thousands of teachers marched in Mexico City on Monday.
Some 85.5 million Mexican will vote to elect 500 new federal congress lawmakers, nine governors and nearly 900 municipal leaders in the first major electoral test for President Enrique Pena Nieto in the middle of his six-year term.
The institute’s statement said that, despite Monday’s violence, “the electoral process is going forward” and that contingency measures are being taken to guarantee that people can vote.
Electoral campaigns in Mexico are often marked by violent incidents. A mayoral candidate for Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, Ulises Fabian Quiroz, was murdered as he returned home from a rally in Chilapa, a drug gang-plagued city in Guerrero.
In another incident near Chilapa, former Acapulco mayor Luis Walton, who is running for governor, said some 20 armed men pointed their guns at his convoy in April.
In March, also in Guerrero, a woman candidate in the town of Ahuacuotzingo, Aide Nava, was kidnapped and later found dead. A former vigilante running for mayor was shot dead during a campaign even in the neighbouring state of Michoacan in May.
