MEXICO CITY – A small leftist party in favor of legalizing drugs said Monday that four of its congressional candidates have been attacked while campaigning ahead of Mexico’s July 5 midterm elections.

The latest incident took place Sunday, when a campaign worker was hurt by glass shards after unknown assailants fired on candidate Emmanuel Lopez’s vehicle in Acapulco, Social Democratic Party chairman Jose Carlos Diaz Cuervo said at a press conference.

“He’s out of danger,” the PSD chief said of the injured man. “However, it seems to us unacceptable, requiring of public outcry, that these attacks continue.”

Last Friday, Diaz said, a Molotov cocktail was hurled at PSD hopeful Celina del Carmen Avalos in Tijuana, an incident that followed attacks on two of the party’s candidates in the central state of Mexico.

The assaults have “a clear intention to intimidate us ... something we interpret as a sign we are doing well, disturbing precisely the interests that have this country prostrate before organized crime,” the PSD chairman said.

All four cases have been reported to police in the respective jurisdictions, Diaz said.

“It’s time authorities said something about this. These acts of violence cannot be allowed to pass as campaign anecdotes,” he said.

Asked whether he thought Mexico’s powerful drug cartels could be behind the assaults, PSD deputy chairman Luciano Pascoe said the party, which currently has only five members in the 500-seat lower house and none in the Mexican Senate, had no evidence to support that theory.

“What we are beginning to find is that they (the attacks) are directed against the party, against the proposals, and this speaks of a political profile,” Pascoe said. “What they won’t achieve with bullets is to silence us.”

Diaz was more explicit.

“Doubtless, unlike the federal government, it appears the drug traffickers do understand that the regulation of that market would take the business away from them and would be a more intelligent way to combat them,” he said.

Mexico has been plagued in recent years by drug-related violence, with powerful cartels battling each other and the security forces, as rival gangs vie for control of lucrative smuggling and distribution routes.

Gunmen working for the cartels murdered around 1,500 people in 2006 and 2,700 people in 2007, with the 2008 death toll soaring to more than 6,000.

Some 2,500 people have died so far this year.

Since taking office in December 2006, right-wing President Felipe Calderon has deployed more than 45,000 soldiers and 20,000 federal police officers across Mexico in a bid to tame the violence, yet the pace of killings has only accelerated. EFE