MORELIA, Mexico ? Mexicans are headed to the polls today in the western state of Michoacan in a crucial political test for President Felipe Calderon in his home state and as his sister seeks the governor's seat there.
Voters will pick 40 federal congressional representatives and 112 mayors following dozens of drug cartel-related attacks over the last two years targeting local officials.
Sunday's election is seen as a precursor to Mexico's presidential elections next year, in which early polls show Calderon's National Action Party, or PAN, struggling to retain the presidency.
The vote will also reflect more clearly on the president with his sister, Luisa Maria "Cocoa" Calderon, running for governor in the family's home state, and where the president launched his frontal attack on drug cartels in late 2006.
Luisa Maria Calderon promised to advance her brother's offensive and led in most opinion polls going into the vote, the last state election until the presidential contest in July. A victory would boost the morale of the PAN, which has held the presidency since 2000 but has been hurt recently by voter fatigue with drug violence.
Such violence has been a main concern in Michoacan and threatened to disrupt the orderly functioning of the vote Sunday.
Residents of the rural city of Cheran refused to let poll workers into their town amid demands for an election that they said would respect their customs and traditions. The indigenous Purepecha people who live in Cheran have in recent months wielded rifles and mounted roadblocks keeping out suspected illegal loggers and drug traffickers.
The Michoacan Electoral Institute said in a news release Sunday that officials were still unable to carry out elections in Cheran and were determining how the 16,000 residents there will elect their leaders. Voting continued elsewhere in the state, despite the problems in Cheran.
In the city of La Piedad, also in Michoacan, a local newspaper published on Sunday an unsigned note blaming the PAN for drug killings and threatening the party's supporters. News reports said the newspaper had been forced to publish the warning.
"Don't wear T-shirts or PAN advertising because we don't want to confuse you and have innocent people die," read the note, which was also circulated by email.
It was not immediately clear who sent the email or published the newspaper ad, which came 11 days after La Piedad Mayor Ricardo Guzman was shot dead while handing out leaflets for several PAN candidates, including Luisa Maria Calderon. No arrests have been made in the attack.
The PAN has yet to win a governorship in Michoacan, and the leftist Revolutionary Democratic Party, or PRD, has dominated federal offices and the presidential vote there since 2000. Local offices have been a toss-up between the PRD and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Calderon faces PRD candidate Silvano Aureoles Conejo and Morelia Mayor Fausto Vallejo Figueroa of the PRI.
The PRI seeks a victory to build momentum for regaining the presidency, which it lost the presidency to the PAN in 2000 after 71 years of single-party rule. The PRI so far is fielding the most popular pre-candidate in the presidential race, former Mexico state Gov. Enrique Pena Nieto.
"Whoever wins, their party will claim it helps for 2012, especially the current underdogs ? PAN and PRD," said Shannon O'Neil, a Latin America expert for the U.S.-based think tank the Council on Foreign Relations.
The once-dominant PRD is trailing the other two major parties in the Michoacan governor's race, according to the polls. As Michoacan's governing party for a decade, the PRD has been criticized for failing to quell the state's drug violence, and some of its legislative candidates are accused of having close ties to drug cartels.
More than 40,000 people have died in drug-related violence across Mexico during the federal government's five-year offensive, according to many estimates. Calderon's administration hasn't released official figures since nearly a year ago, when it counted 35,000.
While many of Mexico's 32 states have been penetrated by narco-politics, nowhere is that influence as overt as in Michoacan, where the electoral season so far has seen, in addition to Guzman's slaying, the kidnapping of nine polling firm workers and the withdrawal of at least a dozen candidates frightened off the campaign trail by organized crime.
Julio Cesar Godoy Toscano of the PRD in Michoacan was elected to Congress in 2009 only to turn fugitive after being charged with aiding drug trafficking and money laundering.
Also in 2009, prosecutors ordered the arrest of 12 Michoacan mayors and 23 other state and local officials, mostly from the PRD, due to allegations that they had protected the Michoacan-based La Familia cartel. Every one of them had been acquitted by April of this year. Prosecutors filed a complaint against one judge for improperly acquitting the officials, but mayors say the charges were weak and often based on a single informant.
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Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
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