The body of a woman running for election as mayor of a small Mexican town has been discovered after she was kidnapped and reportedly decapitated in the same region where 43 student teachers disappeared last year.

Aidé Nava’s body was found on a dirt road in the beleaguered Mexican state of Guerrero on Tuesday night, hours after she was abducted by a group of armed men, Guerrero’s chief prosecutor Miguel Angel Godínez told Milenio TV.

Godínez did not confirm local media reports that Nava had been beheaded, but said: “It is a very unfortunate and important case that we have to treat with a great deal of care.”

Nava’s assassination once again highlights the interrelation of drug war violence and politics in Guerrero, which has posed a stubborn challenge to President Enrique Peña Nieto’s claims that Mexican democracy is robust enough to withstand the pressures of the country’s security crisis.

The president is still struggling to deal with the fallout from the disappearance of the 43 students in September, after they were attacked by municipal police allegedly at the behest of a local mayor in league with a local drug gang.

Nava, 42, was seeking to become the mayoral candidate of the leftwing Democratic Revolution Party in the town of Ahuacuotzingo, ahead of elections in June.

Her husband, Francisco Quiñónez, served as mayor of the same town for the same party between 2009 and 2012. He was shot dead in June 2014, two years after the couple’s son disappeared after being kidnapped.

Nava, who had announced her intention to run at the weekend, was holding a meeting with local supporters when she was abducted on Monday night. Her body was found within the same general area.

Local media reported that a message was left beside Nava’s remains written in red letters and signed by a local drug gang called Los Rojos, or The Reds.

“This is what is going to happen to all the fucking politicians who do not want to get in line” the message said, according to the website of the news magazine Proceso.

Los Rojos’s reputed domination of this part of Guerrero has been challenged in recent months with a a series of murders – including a number of decapitations – attributed to a turf war with another group known as Los Ardillos.

Nava’s death also comes within a week of two armed attacks on mayors in the north of the country.

Leticia Salazar, the mayor of the northeastern border city of Matamoros, suffered an armed attack on a convoy she was travelling in on Sunday. She escaped unharmed.

Juan Acosta, the mayor of the town of Choix in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, is currently in hospital after suffering bullet wounds sustained in an attack on a vehicle he was travelling in with members of his family on Friday.

