An elected mayor was murdered on a bus in the Mexican resort city of Acapulco early Monday.
Retired Navy Captain Salvador Villalba, 53, was returning from a meeting with military officials in Mexico City when gunmen intercepted the bus, the Guerrero State Attorney General’s Office said.
Millennium The media reported that three attackers pulled the driver off the bus and attacked him.
Two of the suspects then entered the vehicle and went seat by seat looking for Villalba until they were able to match him to a photo they had of him on a smartphone before shooting him four times.
A woman who was on the bus was also hit by gunfire and rushed to a local hospital, where she is recovering and is in stable condition.
Salvador Villalba, elected mayor of the southern Mexican municipality of Copala, was murdered on Monday aboard a bus in the resort city of Acapulco. The retired Navy captain was 53 years old
The Milenio news network reported that the gunmen entered the bus and searched every seat, matching passengers to a photo taken with a smartphone before locating mayor-elect Salvador Villalba and shooting him four times.
At least 34 political candidates were murdered ahead of Mexico’s June 2 elections, according to human rights organization Data Civica. However, the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador only recorded 23 homicides.
Villalba decided to run for office after his friend Jesús González, leader of Mexico’s Green Ecologist Party, was murdered in June 2023 after he raised accusations that Mayor Guadalupe García, Villalba’s cousin, had threatened him with violence if he did not. cleared the way for his preferred candidates for public office.
Milenio reported that Villalba was offered money to drop out of the race at the beginning of his campaign, but he refused to do so.
He ran under the Movimiento México Avanza party and defeated Morena’s candidate, José Chávez, obtaining 39 percent of the vote.
Villalba had two federal police officers assigned to his security team, but the protection was only valid while traveling within the state of Guerrero.
The Guerrero State Attorney General’s Office said gunmen intercepted the bus carrying mayor-elect and retired Navy captain Salvador Villalba after attending a meeting with military officials in Mexico City and shot him to death. .
Salvador Villalba, mayor-elect of the southern Mexican city of Copala, poses with his father in a photo, one of many he shared on Facebook on Sunday to celebrate Father’s Day.
Retired Navy Captain Salvador Villalba was offered money to shorten his campaign, but he refused and was later elected mayor of the southern Mexican city of Copala.
On Sunday, the elected mayor of Copala shared a series of photographs and videos of him and his father on Facebook to commemorate Father’s Day.
His last message thanked his followers for electing him as mayor.
‘The people are with me and I will not fail them,’ he declared.
His brother, Jesús Villalba, called on President López Obrador to guarantee that the attackers are arrested and prosecuted.
‘We don’t know how it happened, how everything was handled so that my brother’s life was taken,’ Jesús Villalba told the local media. Coastal Free Press. ‘He was a person who had a goal and thank God he achieved it, he won, I don’t understand why deprive him of his life.
“If he was going to work right or wrong, they should have left him, but they shouldn’t have taken his life.”
