Schools and some businesses were closed and few people walked the streets of the city south of the Mexican capital on Tuesday, hours after five people were shot dead on the same street where the second attack left eight dead just eight months earlier.

Huitzilac is at the center of a troubled area in the state of Morelos with competing criminal organizations and illegal logging. Those killed were apparently campaigning for local positions that manage the community’s shared resources, such as the surrounding forest, ahead of elections scheduled for March.

On Monday afternoon, as they have been every afternoon for the past few weeks, four men and a woman from one of the groups competing in local elections to manage communal land and forests walked door to door campaigning. They were intercepted by armed attackers in two vehicles and left for dead on the main street of Huitzilaca.

“For years I told them not to participate, there are always problems,” said Blanca Delgadillo, whose son-in-law José Cuevas, a farmer, was among those killed.

Delgadillo, 70, said violence has gripped the farming community in recent years, forcing its 20,000 residents to live in fear.

Mayor César Dávila Díaz, who took office on January 1, condemned the attack in publish on social networkssaying that such events “hit our municipality because we have always been marked as a hotbed” of violence.

The mayor denied the existence of a drug cartel, rejected the possibility of a political motive and said he did not know what the motive was.

On Tuesday morning, traces of blood and five candles were visible on the road.

Two hundred members of the National Guard arrived to support local and state police patrolling the area.

José Romero, a 53-year-old farmer who lives just steps away from where the attack took place, said he was watching television when he heard the shots.

He said security in the city is high and weak depending on the presence of security forces. When the National Guard is not present, attacks like this happen, Romero said.

The attack last May targeted men drinking beer after a soccer match, just two weeks before Mexico’s presidential election. Four people died on the spot, while another four died after being transported to the hospital Morelos’ prosecutor’s office, he said at that time.

President Claudia Sheinbaum, who easily won those elections, took charge of the complicated security situation. On Friday, Sheinbaum launched a campaign to reduce the number of guns on the country’s streets. offering cash for firearms.

Dozens of criminal organizations are fighting for territory across Mexico, seeking to provide safe routes for the smuggling of migrants, drugs and weapons, but also increasingly to extort communities.

Her administration has shown a greater willingness to tackle organized crime than that of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but the hotspots stretch across the country. Factions Sinaloa poster they have been at war for months in the capital of the state of Sinaloa.

The Sinaloa Cartel and The new generation of Jalisco the cartels fight in a series of states ranging from central Michoacán to the southern state Chiapas along the border of Guatemala.

On Tuesday, the body parts of an unknown number of victims were found along a highway in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, as the state’s governor announced the arrival of 180 troops to deal with the growing violence. Earlier this month, a shooting in a bar left seven dead and five wounded in Tabasco.

Tabasco, home to oil production facilities, has seen an increase in violent crime in recent months. In December of seven inmates were killed in the Tabasco prison riot. A month before that, six people were killed and 10 wounded in another armed attack on a bar in the country.