Violent Mexican states elect new governors

Mexicans headed to the polls today to elect new governors in 12 states, with the ruling party seeking to maintain its decades-old grip on two regions beset by drug violence.
President Enrique Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is favored to keep the governorship in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, days after it was rocked by the 24-hour kidnapping of a famous football player.
But the PRI faces a tighter race in the neighboring eastern state of Veracruz, another violence-scarred region it has controlled for decades where a human head was found near a polling place on Saturday.
The PRI holds the governorship in nine of the dozen states up for grabs, two years before presidential elections in 2018. The other 20 federal regions are not choosing new heads of government on Sunday.

"This election is a thermometer to see how things will turn out in 2018," Jose Antonio Crespo, a political expert at the Center for Economics Research and Teaching, told AFP.
Tamaulipas and Veracruz remained PRI strongholds even after the party lost its 71-year grip on the presidency in 2000. Pena Nieto returned the PRI to power in 2012.

Pena Nieto said after casting his vote for a local constitutional assembly in Mexico City that the elections were taking place in "an atmosphere of great civility."
But on the eve of the vote, a human head was found in a park near a school serving as a polling place in Veracruz, a state plagued by drug cartels.

A note threatening the local mayor and his son, a leftist candidate running for the state legislature, was left next to the head in the town of Emiliano Zapata, a military official told AFP.