“It’s been a hectic four years,” the governor of Michoacán, Alfredo Ramírez Bedolla, said in October with a broad smile, without knowing that things in his state would change completely in the space of a month, after the murder of Bernardo Bravo, leader of the Lemon, and Carlos Manzo, independent mayor of Uruapan, killed despite having federal and state protection. The Morenoist politician was full of optimism in those early days last month, after presenting his fourth government report amid a catchy propaganda campaign titled “Michoacán is better today.”
Interviewed by state public television, Ramírez Bedolla claimed victory for having reversed the “failed state” condition in which the Administration had fallen from the hands of former PRD governor Silvano Aureoles. “Michoacán comes from a cocktail of crises: educational, financial, security, ungovernability, corruption…” he said triumphantly.
The governor boasted a 60% decrease in manslaughters, given that with Aureoles 270 were committed per month, and now “only 95 or 100”. He spoke calmly about investments, ending the teachers’ conflict, reducing debt and building schools and hospitals. He showed his pride in the construction of the Morelia and Uruapan cable cars, a work worth 3 billion pesos that he had copied from what Claudia Sheinbaum did in Mexico City.
It took a month for reality to prevail over propaganda, with three delicate murders that turned Michoacán into the national red light and a source of crisis for Sheinbaum, who presented an ambitious security and justice plan, which is in fact a federal intervention similar to those attempted by former presidents Felipe Calderón in 2007 and Enrique Peña Nieto in 2014.
The murder of Bernardo Bravo, which occurred on October 19, and that of Carlos Manzo, on November 1, as well as that of Alejandro Torres Mora, nephew of the old self-defense leader Hipólito Mora, made it clear that extortion and violence are still present in Michoacán.
The opposition had warned this on September 25, when Ramírez Bedolla appeared before the State Congress to present his report and heard PRI deputy Guillermo Valencia Reyes warn him: “the municipalities ask for protection, security and peace, and we must not leave them alone. There is a tragic number of mayors executed in these four years.”
If there is something that has cast a shadow over the Ramírez Bedolla administration, it is the assassination of seven mayors: Enrique Velázquez, of Coatepec, and César Arturo Valencia, of Aguililla, in 2022; Guillermo Torres, of Churumuco, and Yolanda Sánchez, of Cotija, in 2024; Salvador Bastida, from Tacámbaro; Martha Laura Mendoza, from Tacámbaro, and Carlos Manzo, from Uruapan, in 2025.
“Violence persists, extortion suffocates and fear is routine (..). This is the reality that does not appear in the report”, blurted out PAN deputy Ana Vanesa Caratachea, in a Congress where Morena governs almost without checks and balances.
“I understand more about violence than you think”
As a child, Ramírez Bedolla was a victim of the violence that characterizes Michoacán, one of the Mexican states to which the Revolution did not do justice. With high levels of marginalization, it was the main source of migrant expulsion in the 20th century, a land of chiefs, cultivation routes and drug trafficking. In that barbaric Michoacán, in the mid-1980s, the father of the current governor, who was a lawyer and rancher, was murdered.
“Almost 40 years ago, right in Uruapan, my father was murdered and my courageous mother, who was a dentist, helped us. I understand more than you think the impact of violence and how difficult it is to be an orphan at the age of ten,” he himself said during the presentation of the Michoacán Plan, in front of the president and the security cabinet, last Sunday.
For this reason, he said, the assassination of the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, brought him back to his past of violence and orphanage, shared by thousands of Michoacans.
Ramírez Bedolla was born in 1976, in Morelia, and studied law at the University Michoacana de San Nicolás. Attracted by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, also from Michoacan, he began his political career in 1997, when the moral leader of the PRD was seeking the head of government of the Federal District, the country’s capital.
Bedolla held minor positions in the capital’s PRD until he became deputy director of the Treasury in 2001, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the position of head of government and invited Carlos Urzúa as his finance secretary and Óscar Rosado, the current head of Condusef, as treasurer.
His return to Michoacán came five years later, in the last year of governor Lázaro Cárdenas Batel (2001-2007), Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ eldest son. The governor invited him to the local Secretariat for Economic Development, where two years later, during the mandate of Leonel Godoy, also from the PRD, he became undersecretary for the development of micro and small businesses.
In 2011, at the end of the Godoy government and after the PRI broke a series of left-wing governments with the victory of Fausto Vallejo, Bedolla was appointed state president of the PRD. Months later he resigned from the leadership and the party and in 2012 joined the National Regeneration Movement, which was then seeking registration as a political party. He was responsible for the state’s economic project.
His loyalty to López Obrador was rewarded in 2015, with his candidacy for the municipal presidency of Morelia, the state capital. After a testimonial campaign, Ramírez Bedolla came eighth, with just 11,000 votes. He was defeated by expanist Alfonso Martínez Alcázar, who ran as an independent. The PRD candidate in those elections was Raúl Morón, who years later would go to Morena. In those elections, the PRD returned to the governorship led by Silvano Aureoles, but without the support of López Obrador.
Replacement candidate
Ramírez Bedolla became a local deputy in 2018, the year AMLO won the presidency. In the local Congress he was a severe critic of governor Aureoles, whom he accused of being a politician in the election campaign and not an interim governor. He denounced its security failure and the failure of state finances. He also filed a constitutional challenge against the approval of a debt that, according to his calculations, would have reached almost 20 billion pesos.
Looking ahead to the 2021 electoral process, Morena left the election of his 2021 candidate for governor in the hands of a poll. Former PRD deputy Raúl Morón won with more than 50% of the vote, while Ramírez Bedolla obtained just 22% and had to settle for a new candidacy for the municipal presidency of Morelia.
Morón, however, violated inspection regulations. In March 2021, the National Electoral Institute (INE) canceled his registration as a candidate and gave Morena five days to nominate a replacement. This is Ramírez Bedolla, who only had a month to campaign and yet won the June 6 elections with an advantage of 50,000 votes and just 3% over his rival Carlos Herrera Tello, the standard-bearer of the PRD, PAN and PRI coalition.
Ramírez Bedolla’s triumph was overshadowed by the denunciation of the opposition, which submitted a request to the Electoral Tribunal of the Judiciary of the Federation (TEPJF) to annul the elections due to widespread violence and the intervention of organized crime to the advantage of Morena. The Court confirmed the victory of the Morenista, but annulled the votes of four municipalities (Múgica, Gabriel Zamora, La Huacana and Nuevo Urecho) admitting that there had been an intervention by organized crime, even if it did not consider it decisive for the result.
The governor began his mandate with this stain, amplified by the denunciation of opposition leaders, who raised the alleged interference of drug trafficking in the elections in the states of Michoacán and Sinaloa of the Organization of American States.
The morenista has accumulated other accusations, such as his relationship with his aunt Anabel Bedolla Marín. She was the wife of Adalberto Fructuoso Comparán, former PRD mayor of Aguililla, arrested in 2021 and extradited to the United States accused of being part of Los Viagra, one of the criminal groups present in the entity.
Despite everything, Ramírez Bedolla became one of López Obrador’s favorite governors and an enthusiastic promoter of Claudia Sheinbaum’s campaign. An anecdote demonstrates his closeness to the current president: in January 2023, when the then head of government tried to be the presidential standard-bearer of his party, he went to Morelia as part of his promotional tours. That day, a subway train crashed on Line 3, killing one person and injuring 106 people. Sheinbaum canceled the visit and rushed back to the capital. He did so aboard a helicopter provided by the governor of Michoacan.
Fortune is not smiling today at Ramírez Bedolla, who was kicked out of Carlos Manzo’s funeral on November 2nd, and who has given birth to a social movement calling for more attention to security, fighting against organized crime and putting an end to extortion. The movement takes to the streets and municipal buildings and has transformed the hat of the former mayor of Uruapan into a symbol of resistance. It is in this circumstance that Claudia Sheinbaum now comes to his aid.
