Meanwhile, Mexico deployed some 40,000 security forces throughout Guerrero and nearby Oaxaca state where teachers staged their own separate boycott of the election in protest of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s education reforms.
The security forces' deployment followed what has been described as the "dirtiest elections" in Mexico's democratic history. At least seven candidates and nine campaign officials have been murdered in the lead up to the vote. In one case, a note was left by the victim’s body promising the same fate for any other politician who didn’t fall in line with the drug cartel’s objectives.
The lower house of Mexico's Congress, nine state governorships and more than 1,000 posts in state legislatures and mayors' offices will be decided in Sunday's election.
In Tixtla, activists approached voting stations where officials handed over materials for Sunday’s election, Sin Embargo, a Mexican news website, reported.
Protesters told polling officials that "tomorrow it may be their relatives who are forcibly disappeared," Sin Embargo added.
On Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School — “normal” schools are free boarding schools that train the rural poor to become teachers, and are known for social activism — were organizing for an upcoming protest when local police opened fire on them in the city of Iguala.
In the aftermath, 43 students were missing, and are believed to have been handed over by the police to a local drug cartel and murdered. The students' relatives and classmates, however, reject the government's version of events and have vowed radical action until they are returned alive.
As activists burned the voting materials on Sunday, they shouted slogans including “Ayotzinapa lives” and “We will not allow the electoral farce,” Sin Embargo reported.
Parents of the missing students said they would go to all of the polling stations in Tixtla to try to prevent voting. In response, Mexico deployed security forces throughout the state and installed checkpoints on the road to the capital, Chilpancingo, Sin Embargo reported.
“The government has launched a nationwide operation in order to guarantee citizens the conditions that will let them exercise their vote,” a statement from the Interior Ministry said according to TeleSur.
Protesters, for their part, have occupied government buildings and blocked highways in recent months in an attempt to draw attention to what they say is the government’s complicity in the murders of the 43 students and its failure to seek justice, Latin American news network TeleSur reported.
In bordering Oaxaca state, a section of Mexico’s teachers union, the National Coordinator of Educational Workers (CNTE), declared their own boycott of the mid-term elections.
Spokesman Mohamed Otaqui Toledo said the teachers’ action was because of “the simple fact that the political parties … are responsible for the approval of education reform,” TeleSur reported.
Thousands of teachers across Mexico have protested Pena Nieto’s 2014 education reforms — born from the president’s alterations to the constitution that called for all education to be privatized and for parents to pay students’ expenses.
The union is calling for the annulment of Articles 3 and 73 of the constitution, which was added for Pena Nieto's stated purpose of providing “quality education for all,” TeleSur reported. Article 3 calls for privatization of education and an end to free and mandatory schooling, while Article 73 says all financial costs should be covered by the parents of students, according to TeleSur.
Critics of the reforms said they would make education impossible for the poor to afford, and would transfer much of the teachers unions’ power to the federa
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