Politics
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party will keep control of Congress, preliminary election results suggest, reports the BBC.
The PRI is set to win about 30%, with the conservative National Action Party on about 22%, said the head of the National Electoral Institute. On current projections, the PRI will see its number of seats drop slightly. The run-up to the poll was marked by violence with drug cartels blamed for the deaths of several candidates.
On Sunday morning, protesters and parents of 43 students who disappeared last year burned election material in the town of Tixtla.
They say they want answers about what happened to the students before elections are held. A dissident teachers' union also burned ballots and ransacked offices of political parties to express its anger at education reforms.
Fresh violence flared over the weekend, reports Reuters, with 16 people killed on Saturday when gangs clashed near the resort city of Acapulco, although it appeared to be unrelated to the election. Some 40,000 police and troops were deployed across southern Mexico to safeguard the vote.
Activists stole or set fire to dozens of ballot boxes in the restive states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Chiapas early on Sunday, but the vote was otherwise largely peaceful. Underscoring disenchantment with the PRI, a blunt, outspoken rancher who defected from the party looked on course to become the first independent candidate to win a state governorship in modern Mexican history, early results showed.
