Alejandro Aros, the mayor of the southwestern Chileno city, was killed less than a week after taking office.
These are the final moments of Carlos Manzo’s life.
The mayor of Uruapan, Mexico at the Day of the Dead festival in the state of Mikoaka.
>> November 1st, 2025, Day of the Dead.
The mayor of Ouruapon walks through a candle lit plaza.
His young son in his arms, he sets the boy down.
A teenager steps out of the crowd, raises a gun, and changes Mexico forever.
Here are nine politicians instantly killed by Mexican drug cartels.
Well, Mexican President Claudia Shaneb has vowed to hunt down those behind the brazen killing of a Carlos Manzo, the mayor of the city of Udapan.
Manzo was assassinated in front of dozens of onlookers at a festival.
He had begged the president for help.
He had told the country on camera that the cartels were closing in.
He had been called the Mexican Bouel, a 40-year-old independent mayor with a zero tolerance stance against organized crime in a state where organized crime ran the orchards, the police, and the politicians.
Carlos Alberto Manzo Rodriguez wasn’t supposed to win.
Uruapan Mitoan, the avocado capital of the world was carved up between the Jaliscoco Newer cartel and the cartel’s unidos.
They taxed the farmers.
They picked the mayors.
And in June 2024, when Monzo broke from the ruling Morana party and ran as an independent, the cartels expected him to lose.
He won in a landslide.
66% of the vote, six candidates, one winner.
Once in office, Monzo did the unthinkable.
He authorized his municipal police to use deadly force against criminals.
He went on national television and criticized President Claudia Shinbomb’s hugs not bullets strategy.
He pleaded for the federal government to send help.
It never came.
October 2025, a lime grower who had refused to pay extortion was killed.
A nearby mayor was killed days later.
The pattern was tightening like a noose and Manzo knew it.
He told reporters he expected to die.
November 1st, 2025.
Festival de Las in Uruapan’s main square.
Candles everywhere.
Families in costumes.
Monzo walked through the plaza holding his young son.
He posed for photos.
He greeted residents.
He set the boy down for a moment.
A 17-year-old named Victor Manuel Ubaldo, a meth addict, pulled out of a Yuruapon rehab center by the CJNG, stepped out of the crowd and shot the mayor multiple times at pointlank range.
One of Monzo’s bodyguards killed Ubaldo on the spot.
Two of Ubaldo’s accompllices vanished within days.
Their bodies turned up on the Uruapan Paracho Highway, executed by their own cartel to bury the trail.
His widow, Greca Kiras, was sworn in as mayor days later.
At his funeral, the governor of Mishuakan was screamed out of the building.
Residents called him a murderer to his face.
And in cities across Mexico, thousands marched, chanting forwards that became the slogan of a movement.
Carlos didn’t die.
The government killed him.
A Mexican mayor who promised to rid her town of organized crime was shot dead less than a day after taking office.
Jelam was sworn in as the mayor of Tamiko in the state of Melos on New Year’s Day.
Local authorities said she was gunned down at her home the next morning.
Monzo at least got a year in office, but Jazela Moda didn’t even get 24 hours.
January 1st, 2016, New Year’s Day.
The city of Tamixco, Morelos, just south of Mexico City on the highway that runs straight to Aapulco.
33-year-old Jazela Moto Okmpo stood in front of her family, her supporters, and a wall of television cameras.
She had been a federal congresswoman.
She was a leftist with the PRD.
And on the first day of the new year, she raised her right hand and was sworn in as mayor.
In her inaugural speech, she made a promise.
Her fight against organized crime, she said, would be frontal and direct.
No deals, no negotiations, no looking the other way while the cartels emptied her town.
Those words sealed her fate before the new year was a day old, less than 18 hours after she took the oath.
While the rest of Mexico was still nursing New Year’s hangovers, gunmen burst through the front door of her home.
They beat her.
They shot her.
They left.
Her marital term lasted less than 24 hours.
Federal police caught up with the killers in a high-speed chase through the streets of Tamixo.
The suspects opened fire on police and soldiers from inside their SUV.
Two of the gunmen died in the shootout.
Three more were arrested, including a 32-year-old woman, an 18-year-old man, and a minor.
In the back of their vehicle, investigators found a 9mm pistol, an Uzi submachine gun, ski masks, and Mexico state plates.
Then came the part that made every politician in Melos go pale.
When the captured minor started talking, the details came out one by one.
The contract had been worth $29,000.
The killers had been working for Los Roos, a cartel locked in a death war with Guerrero Zunidos for control of every drug route running between Mexico City and Aapulco.
The hit had been planned before Moto was even sworn in.
And the worst detail of all, Jazelle Modota’s name was just one of at least half a dozen on the team’s kill list.
They had been moving down the names systematically.
She was first because she had been the loudest.
The murder, prosecutors believed, was a warning, a message to every other small town mayor in Mexico.
Don’t try to clean up your local police.
Don’t try to break the cartel’s grip on your town or you will not survive your first day in office.
The flags and mellos flew at half mast for 3 days.
Then the killings continued.
Most of the mayors in this video got one shot at death, but Maria Santos Garasti Eta got far worse.
She was a doctor.
She was 32 years old when she was elected mayor of Tikicho Mituakan in 2008, a town stuck deep in territory controlled by Laafamilia Mitoakana and the Knights Templar.
She refused their bribes.
She refused to look the other way and the cartels refused to let her live.
October 2009, one year into her term, gunmen ambushed her car.
Her husband Jose Sanchez Chavez was killed beside her.
She survived, riddled with seven bullet wounds.
January 23rd, 2010, just three months later, armed men attacked her again in Suodad Alamarano, Guerrero.
Bullets tore through her abdomen, her chest, her leg.
The car crashed.
She lived.
The wounds left her in constant pain.
They left her dependent on a colostomy bag for the rest of her life.
Most politicians would have resigned.
Most would have moved their family to Mexico City and stopped speaking publicly.
Maria Santos did the opposite.
She published photographs of her own scarred body in a magazine.
She wrote, “I wanted to show you my wounded muted body because I’m not ashamed of it.
It’s living testimony that I am a strong and righteous woman and despite my wounds, I’m still on my feet.
” The international press called her a heroin of the 21st century.
The cartels called her a target who was still breathing.
November 12th, 2012.
She was dropping her daughter off at school in Moralia.
Gunmen pulled in front of her car.
As they dragged her out, she begged them.
She pleaded to leave the little girl alone.
And surprisingly they did, but abducted her in return, making her the messiah to pay for her life and that of her daughter.
5 days later, farm workers in a rural municipality of San Juan Tara Romeo found her body.
She had been beaten to death.
The cause of death was traumatic brain injury, severe blows to the head.
Her body was half naked, tortured, mutated.
The bullets couldn’t kill her.
The ambushes couldn’t kill her.
So they had to do it with their hands.
She was buried beside the husband they had murdered 3 years earlier.
Alejandro Aros, the mayor of the southwestern Chilopenso city, was killed less than a week after taking office.
State officials confirmed the killing after graphic images on social media showed the newly elected mayor’s decapitated body with his head left on a pickup truck for everyone to see.
Chilancho, the state capital of Guerrero, a city of 300,000 people locked in a brutal turf war between two cartels, Los Sardos and Los Talacos, that had turned the streets into a daily horror show.
mutilated bodies, hijacked government vehicles, police taken hostage.
In 2023, the gangs even staged a public protest of hundreds of people to free their arrested members.
Into this nightmare walked 43-year-old Alejandro Aros Catalan.
He won the June 2024 election by 1,700 votes.
He was a former state legislator.
He had a degree in political science.
And on October 1st, 2024, the same day Claudia Shinbomb was inaugurated as Mexico’s first female president, Aros was sworn in as mayor of Chilaningo.
His very first speech was a plea for peace.
He tried to broker a truce between Los and Los.
He reached out to both sides.
He thought he could be a bridge, but what happened next was a warning.
3 days into his term, his deputy and Chil Panchchingo’s incoming security chief were both murdered.
The signal was unmistakable.
Aros kept going anyway.
October 6th, 2024, 6 days into office, Mayor Aros personally helped deliver water and supplies to communities devastated by Hurricane John.
After his shift, he told his staff he had a private meeting in Pedakius.
He left without his security detail.
He never came back.
Hours later, his pickup truck was found abandoned.
His body was inside.
His head was on the roof.
Local human rights activists pinned the killing on Los Sardos.
But the case took an even darker turn weeks later when authorities arrested the man they said had organized the murder.
His name was German Reyes.
He was a former military captain.
He was until recently the special prosecutor for the state of Guerrero.
And just like that, the man hired to put criminals in jail had helped them put a head on a roof.
Unlike other politicians on our list, Nava Gonzalez lost her entire family before they ever got to her.
It started with her husband.
Francisco Kinyones Ramirez was the mayor of Awao Guerrero between 2009 and 2012.
He was a member of the leftist PRD.
In June 2014, while driving down a rural highway in Guerrero, an assassin stepped out of nowhere and gunned him down on the side of the road.
Then it was her son.
2 years earlier, in October 2012, Francisco Jr.
had been kidnapped by armed men in broad daylight.
The family waited for a ransom call.
It never came.
They waited for any sign at all.
a body, a piece of clothing, a phone call, nothing.
The boy simply vanished into the dark hills of Guerrero, and the cartels who took him never bothered to explain why.
Most women would have left.
Most would have moved across the country, changed their name, raised whatever family they had left in some town far from the killers.
But Aiden Nava stayed.
And in March 2015, the 42-year-old declared she would run for the same mayor’s office her husband had once held.
In the same town that had taken her family from her, she made the announcement on a Sunday.
By Tuesday, she had been kidnapped.
Armed men stopped her campaign bus on a rural road, the same highway where her husband had been ambushed less than a year earlier.
They dragged her out of the vehicle in front of her staff.
They threw her into a truck and they disappeared into the hills of Guerrero, the same hills that had swallowed her son 3 years before.
The next morning, her body was found on a rural road near the hamlet of Tecoanapa, or should I say what was left of her body.
The killers had decapitated her.
They had left her remains exposed in the dirt, surrounded by political pamphlets she had never gotten to hand out.
And next to the corpse, spray painted on a banner, was a message signed by Los Ro, the same cartel that would order the killing of Jazela Mota less than a year later.
The message wasn’t really for Ada.
She was already dead.
The message was for every other politician in Mexico.
This will happen to all those politicians who don’t want to line up.
3 months before Mexico’s 2015 elections, Los Rojos had just sent the entire country a recruitment poster delivered in body parts.
Aid Nava had lost her husband, her son, and finally herself.
The cartel had taken everything from her and then turned what was left of her into a public threat.
Morning a man destined to lead, Claval Foto was gunned down with four others only days before the elections, ending his dream of leading Mexico’s Tamalipa state on the US border and chalking up yet more deaths in the run-up to the polls.
Now, up to this point, every politician on this list has been a mayor or a candidate for mayor, small town offices, local power.
But our next case was the man who was about to become a state governor.
June 28th, 2010.
Tamaleipas on the US border.
Rulo Tory Cantou age 46 was a doctor and a federal congressman.
He had stepped down from Congress to run as the PRI candidate for governor of Tamalipas.
The election was 6 days away.
Every poll said he was going to win in a landslide.
The night before, he had told reporters that his number one priority as governor would be tackling insecurity, the polite Mexican word for the daily massacres in his state.
Tamaleipas was the front line of the bloodiest cartel war in the country.
The Gulf cartel and the Zetas, former allies, now mortal enemies, were turning every road, every plaza, and every police station into a battlefield.
That morning, Tory Kantu climbed into his campaign convoy and headed for General Pedro J.
Menddees International Airport.
He was scheduled to fly to Val Hermoso for a final rally.
Riding with him were his campaign manager, his aids, and state lawmaker, Enrique Blackmore.
Two other officials had been booked to ride along that day, a federal deputy, and a former governor of Kohahila.
Both of them mysteriously didn’t show up that morning.
To this day, no one has ever publicly explained why.
Halfway to the airport, the road ahead suddenly disappeared.
A massive tractor trailer had been positioned across the highway, blocking every lane.
As the convoy slowed to a crawl, men in uniforms that looked exactly like Mexican marine fatigues stepped out from both sides of the road.
They opened fire with automatic weapons.
Rodulo Tori Kantu was killed instantly.
So was Blackmore.
So were three others in the convoy.
Four more were wounded.
Mexico had not seen a political assassination this high-profile since 1994 when presidential candidate Luis Dononaldo Colossio was murdered in Tijuana.
The country had spent the entire morning thinking it was about to get a new governor.
By lunchtime, it was holding a funeral.
The investigation pointed straight to one man, Eduardo Costillia Sanchez, Alias Elcos, the supreme leader of the Gulf cartel.
According to a federal protected witness, Tora Canu had been pulled into a 2004 meeting at a Tamalapas ranch where $25 million in cash packed into 10 suitcases had been delivered to local PRI officials in exchange for cartel protection.
Years later, when the Gulf cartel and the Zeta split and went to war over those same drug routes, Tory Kantu was caught in the middle.
His brother Agidio took his place on the ballot 5 days later.
The PRI won the election, and the Gulf cartel had just proven something that terrified every politician in Mexico.
The 2024 Mexican election cycle was the bloodiest in the country’s history.
37 candidates were assassinated in the months leading up to election day.
One of the most disturbing was caught on camera by hundreds of witnesses at his very last campaign event.
Coyuka de Benitees Guerrero, a coastal municipality bordering Akapulkco, one of the most violent regions in the entire country.
The June 2nd election was just days away.
40-year-old Jose Alfredo Cabraa Barentos had spent months campaigning for mayor under an opposition coalition.
He had survived an armed attack in 2023.
He had asked for and received National Guard protection.
He had a security detail.
He did everything by the book.
May 29th, 2024.
Late afternoon, the community of lassi lus Cabrera arrived at his final campaign rally surrounded by armed federal officers.
Roughly 300 supporters were waiting in a small open air venue to hear his closing speech.
The mood was almost celebratory.
The election was just days away.
People held up phones.
The camera crews rolled.
His staff prepared the stage.
Cabrera was smiling.
He was shaking hands.
He was greeting voters as he walked through the crowd toward the platform.
That’s when a man stepped out of the crowd, walked up directly behind him, raised a pistol to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger.
Cabrera collapsed before he even hit the stage.
The killer kept firing.
Screams filled the rally.
Supporters scattered in every direction, trampling chairs, abandoning banners.
National Guard troops returned fire and killed the gunman on the spot.
The whole thing lasted maybe 4 seconds.
The video went viral within minutes.
By the next morning, every news network in the world was running the footage of a man who had been smiling and waving at his voters, walking toward what he thought would be his closing speech when an assassin slipped through 300 people and a federal protection detail and ended his life with a single bullet to the back of the head.
He was the 35th candidate killed in the 2024 cycle.
By the time the polls opened on June 2nd, the number would climb higher.
Mexico’s election was being decided not just at the ballot box, but in the morgs.
Moving on to Mexico now, where a ruling party may candidate was shot dead at an event on the first day of her campaign.
The politician had requested protection from authorities and had received no response.
If Jose Alfredo Cababreda was killed at his final campaign event, our next case was killed at her first, April 1st, 2024.
The town of San Miguel Octopan on the outskirts of Chilea in the state of Guanowato.
37year-old Bertha Gizella Gaitan Gutierrez had just officially launched her campaign for mayor as the candidate for Morena, the ruling party of President Lopez Odor.
This was day one, her first event, her first walk through the streets, meeting voters.
Hours before she set out, she held a press conference in front of every reporter in Sallaya.
She said the words that would haunt her party for months.
She had requested federal protection.
She had filed the paperwork.
She was waiting to hear back.
She campaigned that afternoon at a local market on the outskirts of San Miguel Octopan.
She shook hands.
She handed out flyers.
She posted to Facebook about wanting a chillaya where every person has the opportunity to thrive.
She walked out of the market surrounded by supporters chanting her party’s name and headed down the street toward her next stop.
A bystander’s phone captured what happened next.
The cheering, the walking, the chanting, the sun on the dirt road, then the gunfire.
Gon died on the scene.
Three other people were wounded.
A city council candidate beside her was reported dead, then reported missing.
His fate is still unclear today.
Her federal protection request, it would later be revealed, had been forwarded to local authorities in March and somehow had simply never been acted on.
Sallaya is one of the most dangerous places per capita to be a police officer in North America.
In 2022, more people were killed in Sallaya alone than in the entire United Kingdom, a country of 67 million people.
The Santa Rosa de Lima cartel and the Chaliscoco New Generation cartel had been carving each other up for control of the city for years.
Seven people were eventually arrested.
members of a Santa Rosa de Lima cell, including the leader of the unit, Jisella Gaitan, made it through one press conference, one Facebook post, and one walk through a market.
But unfortunately, her first day of campaigning was also her last.
We’re closing this video with the case that most clearly shows what the cartels had to become by 2024 and what they were willing to do to send a message.
Anibal Zunyiga Cortez was a PRI candidate running for city councelor in Kyuka de Benitez, the same municipality where Jose Alfredo Cabrera would be shot in the head two weeks later.
This was Zunya’s third time running for the position.
He wasn’t a national figure.
He wasn’t even running for mayor.
He was a local guy, a councilman hopeful, the kind of smalltown politician who in any normal country would never make international news.
His wife, Ruby Bravo Sololis, was campaigning with him.
May the 16th, 2024, the morning sun came up over Aapulco, Mexico’s once beloved beach resort, now ranked the third most violent city on Earth.
On Avanita Ruiz Cortinez near the Los Perodistas neighborhood just a few feet from a Mexican military housing unit.
Locals noticed an abandoned gray Nissan pickup truck parked on the side of the road.
In the bed of the truck covered with tarps were several plastic bags.
Police pulled back the tarps and opened the bags.
Inside the bags were the dismembered remains of Anibbo Zunya Cortez and his wife Ruby Bravo Solis.
The Nissan was Zunya’s own truck.
The killers hadn’t just murdered the couple.
They had used his own campaign vehicle as the casket.
And the next body parts in the same truck bed, they had placed something they wanted everyone in Mexico to see.
The candidates’s own political flyers, Pryan PRD coalition propaganda stacked carefully on top of the bags, like an exhibit in a museum.
That same morning in a different neighborhood of Aapulco, four other dismembered bodies had been dumped on the street next to a burned out truck.
Three men and one woman.
Authorities never publicly identified all of them.
They never explained the connection.
The cartels operating in the area, the independent cartel of Aapulco and Los Granados, never claimed responsibility because they didn’t need to.
The message was already on every front page in the country.
If you run for any office in any town, on any ticket, in any party, we can find you.
We can take your wife, we can take your truck, and we can use them all as our signature.
The body count keeps climbing.
Between 2018 and the middle of 2024, more than 1,700 attacks were recorded against Mexican politicians and government officials.
Hundreds were killed.
The 2024 election was the bloodiest in the country’s history.
The 2025 cycle, which has already buried Carlos Monzo and at least seven mayors, is on track to be even worse.
In Mexico today, running for office is one of the most dangerous jobs on Earth.
The cartels don’t just want a piece of the country anymore.
They want to choose who governs it.
And every name on this list is the price of saying no.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
