Friends, family, colleagues mourn slain Mexican mayor

Relatives, friends and public officials gathered Wednesday in the southern Mexican town of Tlaxiaco for the wake of Mayor Alejandro Aparicio, who was murdered on New Year’s Day.

During the course of the morning, dozens of people attended the wake for Aparicio, a member of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ‘s leftist Morena party who was slain hours after taking office on Tuesday.

The municipal attorney, Perfecto Hernandez Gutierrez, died Wednesday of wounds received in the attack that claimed the mayor’s life.

Tlaxiaco is a town of roughly 40,000 people in the state of Oaxaca.

A group of gunmen murdered the new mayor and fired on other people present at a street event. A few hours later, the Oaxaca state Attorney General’s Office announced the arrest of a suspect.

Lopez Obrador on Wednesday expressed sorrow over the murder, noting that he knew Aparicio from a score of visits to Tlaxiaco over the years.

“I asked for action to be taken and (authorities) arrested one of those involved in this cowardly murder, given that they killed him from behind,” the president said.

Aparicio’s death comes after that on Dec. 16 of Olga Gabriela Kobel, the mayor of Juarez, a town in the northern state of Coahuila.

Some 130 candidates and political activists were killed during the campaign leading up to Mexico’s July 1, 2018, general elections.

Six people who won on July 1, five men and a woman, were murdered before they could take office, four of them members of Morena.