Unidecode is the correct answer for this. It transliterates any unicode string into the closest possible representation in ascii text.
Example:
accented_string = u'Málaga'
# accented_string is of type 'unicode'
import unidecode
unaccented_string = unidecode.unidecode(accented_string)
# unaccented_string contains 'Malaga'and is of type 'str'