As Mexico’s mid-term elections drawn near, the county has been awash in violence. Mayoral candidates as well as at least a dozen campaign workers and activists have been murdered, and thousands of ballots have been burned.

On Friday, in response to the pre-election chaos, the Mexican government announced that it would be sending in army troops, marines, and federal police to southern states in an effort to guard polling places.

The decision to fortify the polling areas was made after a group of radical teachers attacked the offices of political parties in the southern state of Chiapas and vowed to block the voting which will take place on Sunday. Joining the ranks of the disgruntled teachers are relatives of the missing 43 students who are believed to have been turned over to a drug gang last September by local police.

As reported in The Associated Press, Mexico's Interior Department said via statement that the deployment of troops and police, which would primarily go to southern states and Oaxaca, is "aimed at ensuring all Mexicans can go to the polls peacefully."

On Friday radical teachers attacked the offices of five political parties in Tuxtla Gutierrez, ransacking computers, paperwork, and furniture in the process and making a show of the destruction by setting fire to in the objects in the street. Elsewhere, unidentified assailants in Guerrero tossed an explosive device at the offices of the conservative National Action Party.

Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez of the Monterrey Technological University believes that in many ways this is the worst election violence that has ever occurred, saying, "We didn't have this level of violence even in 1994, when we had elections at the same time as the Zapatista guerrilla conflict."

As reported in the Guardian, Alejandro Hope, an expert on security, fatalistically explains that the murders of the candidates is the logical consequence of an atmosphere of drug cartel terror coupled with a lack of actual power in the authorities. Writing in El Daily Post, Hope says that given these prevailing conditions, “the surprise is not that some candidates get killed, but that the number of corpses is not much higher.”