The police chief in a small town in central Mexico took his life Friday as troops moved in to arrest him as part of anti-corruption raids that also saw the arrests of several other top police commanders and the mayor of another city.
The raids took place in two rural towns in Mexico state, west of Mexico City, and in two densely populated suburbs on the outskirts of the country’s capital.
Prosecutors said the police chief of one of the rural towns, Texcaltitlan, killed himself with his own gun as Marines, National Guardsmen and soldiers approached him in an attempt to arrest him on unspecified charges.
Troops also arrested the mayor of the nearby town of Amanalco on “various charges,” and also detained the town’s police chief and another local official. They also arrested the police chief of the city of Tejupilco, further south.
The area around the two cities has long been dominated by violence La Familia Michoacana Cartelwho deals with drugs, kidnapping and extortion.
While some of the raids focused on rural areas, authorities also detained the assistant police chief of Naucalpan, a sprawling suburb of 775,000 on the northwestern edge of Mexico City.
They later announced the arrest of a top police chief in the suburb of Ixtapaluca, east of Mexico City, which has a population of about 370,000.
Although prosecutors did not specify the charges against the officials, local media reported that they were accused of colluding with organized crime gangs.
The police chief’s suicide comes just days after another police officer was involved in a crime in Mexico. Last week a former prosecutor and local police official was present arrested in connection with the creepy beheading of a mayor in southern Mexico. Officials said Germán Reyes was arrested on murder charges for the killing of Alejandro Arcos just a week after he took office as mayor of the state capital, Chilpancingo.
Gangs and drug cartels have long infiltrated, intimidated or bribed local officials into working for them. They often went so far as to cut municipal budgets or use local police forces to warn or protect them from federal raids. Sometimes police officers simply profit from the drug trade on a freelance basis.
Speaking out about cartel corruption and extortion can have deadly consequences.
In July, the head of a Mexican business chamber federation in the state of Tamaulipas, across the border from Texas, was killed hours after giving television interviews complaining about the extortion of drug cartels in the state. Just weeks earlier, a leader in Mexico’s fishing industry complained about extortion from drug cartels and illegal fishing shot dead in the northern border state of Baja California.
Last December, cartel leaders went on a murderous rampage to track down corrupt cops who allegedly stole a shipment of drugs in Tijuana/
