9 pollsters now reported missing in western Mexico

— A second Mexican polling firm reported three workers missing Tuesday in a western state plagued by drug violence, two days after six workers from another survey company vanished from the same place.

The nine disappearances in an area of Michoacan state considered a stronghold of warring drug cartels are being treated as kidnappings, according to a Michoacan state government spokesman who was not authorized to be quoted by name.

They also raise concerns that drug violence could interfere with the state's Nov. 13 gubernatorial election and possibly Mexico's 2012 presidential race as well.

"What are we going to do with our poll watchers? What are we going to with the precinct workers?" said Fausto Vallejo, the gubernatorial candidate for the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party in Michoacan.

He called on the state and federal governments to step up security measures for the elections, especially for mayoral and congressional candidates, who are believed to be more vulnerable because they live and campaign in rural areas where the cartels are active.

Federal and state police used a helicopter and patrol vehicles to search the area near the city of Apatzingan where all nine workers disappeared, but found no trace as of Tuesday afternoon. Three missing from the firm, Parametria, were last known to be in the hamlet of La Cofradia, near the same area where six employees of Consulta Mitofsky went missing on Saturday.

Parametria Director Francisco Abundis said the pollsters might have been mistaken for government agents.

"I want these people (possible captors) to know that, if this confusion exists, that our people are what they say they are, they are not undercover agents or from the Interior Department or anything like that ... they were simply doing their job," Abundis said. He added the employees had not been located by Tuesday night.

Parametria said in a statement that it had done polling work in Apatzingan "without incidents, so that the disappearance of the polling personnel is an unusual event."

Two of its workers arrived in Cofradia Monday to interview potential voters. A supervisor went to pick them up, and all three disappeared.

Consulta Mitofsky president Roy Campos wrote in an email message that the six workers from his firm had not been found either.

"The lack of news is exasperating on one hand, but on the other hand it gives us faith that the workers are well," he wrote, given that no signs of violence had been uncovered.

Campos said that on Saturday, the pollsters' cell phones had stopped working, either because they were shut off or out of range. When a supervisor went to the hamlet where they had been working, local residents said they didn't remember seeing any of the missing workers, five men and one woman.

Abundis said that Parametria had previously decided there were some areas of northern Tamaulipas state where it isn't safe enough to work.

He said that since 2010, the company had decided it could not carry out polling in places like San Fernando, Altamira and Valle Hermoso, near the U.S. border, because "we had detected irregular situations there."


