Paula Abdo-Fernández, a former member of the Mexican House of Representatives from Michoacan, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Aug. 3 for fraud. Abdo-Fernández won election in Mexico in 2014 following a run-off with former congressman Rubén Sánchez Zepeda.
Her crimes involved her forging the signatures of individuals, mostly poor Mexicans who had been given $2,000 to vote in her office, to support ballot initiatives, according to the Guardian. Abdo-Fernández was also a leader of El Progreso, a network of vigilante groups that harassed and arrested members of the Mexican opposition.
“In the past 12 months there has been an astonishing increase in the number of murders involving the vigilante-related violence which began to unfold. This should not surprise anyone,” Manuel Angel Zarracina, a constitutional lawyer with the NGO Oxo and the former prosecutor in charge of the investigation who oversaw the investigation into the El Progreso scandal, told Al Jazeera.
While there has been much speculation about possible links between the US and these vigilante killings – or simply to US influence – Zarracina argued that the connection is too complex to simply be linked to Trump’s election as president.
“It has happened here, it’s going to happen there, and we also are aware of this because this is happening around the world, as we speak, and also I’m very sure, we know the answer to this question: where did this happen?” Zarracina asked.
“And in my view, why is this happening? I find it difficult to explain. Some theories are really simple, but this has the tendency to be more complex. We have to understand what is going on here.”
In May, the National Attorney General’s Office announced that it would investigate possible ties between the Republican party and the Knights Templar, which the group considers a terrorist organisation.
The organisation was founded in the late 1970s as a peasant movement to defend the small farming community of Zepeda against rural development and agrarian reform policies. It has since grown to support a wide variety of populist causes, including a number of militias that operate primarily in rural areas.
According to the Guardian, the group has also attempted to use its influence as a politically powerful vigilante organisation against the government.