Authorities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas reported that a group of villagers violently kidnapped a mayor out of a police car. The villagers put him in another vehicle and fled the scene.

The incident took place this week in a rural area of Chiapas, where Alfonso Gomez Gomez, the mayor of Santiago El Pinar, was traveling in a police vehicle along the highway that connects San Cristobal de Las Casas and San Juan Chamula.

After the villagers took the mayor, they fled and left the police vehicle behind. Authorities recovered the vehicle and are in the process of trying to find the missing politician.

No demands for ransom have been made. None of the various indigenous groups or organizations in Chiapas have claimed responsibility for the abduction.

This incident comes three years after angry farmers in Mexico abducted the mayor of their village and dragged him through the streets, claiming he refused to fulfill key campaign promises.

According to a local news outlet, the villagers detained the mayor, tied him to the back of a pickup truck, and dragged him through the streets. 

Footage of the attack shows the mayor being dragged along a road, with a mob running after him. It took dozens of municipal police officers to stop the vehicle and rescue the mayor. 

However, several people were injured in the conflict between the police and those who had abducted the mayor.

According to the outlet, it was the second attack by farmers demanding that he fulfill his campaign promise to repair a local road and bring drinking water and electricity to the community of roughly 500.

Recently, Chiapas has begun to see high levels of violence as rival drug cartels have started clashing in the region for control of lucrative drug trafficking as well as human smuggling routes into Mexico.

Chiapas, being the southern border with Guatemala, is considered one of the immigration hotspots. This is where a large portion of Central and South American migrants enter the country trying to make their way north to the US-Mexico border.