Mexico City - Mexicans vote Sunday in midterm elections after one of the rockiest campaigns in recent years, with candidates murdered and rebel teachers burning ballots in efforts to block the polls.
The radical CNTE teachers union has protested all week in impoverished southern states, ransacking buildings of the National Electoral Institute and regional offices of President Enrique Pena Nieto's party in anger at his education reform.
Despite the unrest, authorities say they are confident the elections to pick 500 members of the lower-chamber of Congress, around 900 mayors and nine governors, will go on.
It is the first major electoral test for Pena Nieto, who has struggled to accomplish his 2012 election promise to bring "peace" back to Mexico after years of drug cartel violence.
Opinion polls show that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its allies will retain their majority in Congress despite political scandals and discontent over security.
Voters angry at the traditional parties could still give politicians a wake up call by electing a blunt candidate nicknamed "El Bronco" as the first ever independent governor, in the industrial state of Nuevo Leon.
But the specter of violence looms large on election day in the south.
"This has been the most difficult and tumultuous campaign, with more murders of candidates and campaign staff members," Javier Oliva, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told AFP.
AFP
