One day before the June 6, 2021 election, PRI member Paola Gárate was kidnapped for around nine hours while she was a candidate for the Congress of the state of Sinaloa.
In an interview with La Silla Rota, the local congresswoman recounted that on Saturday afternoon she went to an alleged meeting of congressional candidates, where she was the only one who showed up.
After leaving the facilities of the League of Agrarian Communities, behind the state PRI headquarters, she headed to her campaign office located on the southeastern outskirts of the city of Culiacán, where they were intercepted by a convoy of more than 20 pickup trucks.
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She recalls seeing armed, masked men who held her for several hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the day of the election.
“We are survivors of that narco-election in which, just like me, thousands of people were abducted — territorial political operators and people who were part of the territorial structure of the Va por México Alliance at the time: PAN, PRI, and PRD,” she said.
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She stated that 90% of the party’s electoral structure had been kidnapped. This structure plays a key role in election oversight by monitoring the vote at polling stations, where many incidents were also reported.
Afterward, another hell followed, she said, because then-Governor Quirino Ordaz worked to discourage the filing of complaints with the Attorney General’s Office, forcing her to turn to international organizations.
However, she acknowledged that the process has been slow and remains unresolved to this day, expressing hope that the mechanisms of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Organization of American States can be improved.
The PRI lawmaker said the United States government is justified in indicting 10 officials accused of having ties to organized crime in Sinaloa, something that was reflected in the 2021 electoral process.
“If evidence is still lacking, as the president has said, then here you have witnesses who survived that narco-election,” she noted.
Regarding the list of officials, she specified that she had legal confrontations with former Sinaloa Security Secretary Gerardo Mérida, whose removal she demanded due to poor results while she served as state president of the PRI.
The former official responded by telling her to “look at your own tail first,” prompting her to file a complaint for gender-based political violence, which was ultimately dismissed.
“The demand is for the Mexican government to comply and make arrests, because if the United States government already fulfilled its part in issuing that arrest order to the Mexican government, it is because they fully complied with the entire process,” she emphasized.
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