The police chief in a small town in central Mexico took his own life Friday as troops closed in to arrest him as part of anticorruption raids that also detained several other top police commanders and the mayor of another town.
The raids took place in two rural towns in the State of Mexico, west of Mexico City, as well as in two populous suburbs right on the edge of the country’s capital.
State prosecutors said the police chief of the one of the rural towns, Texcaltitlan, killed himself with his own weapon as marines, National Guard and soldiers closed in to try 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 town of Tejupilco, farther south.
The area around the two towns has long been dominated by the violent La Familia Michoacana cartel, which deals in drugs, kidnappings and extortion.
While some of the raids targeted rural areas, authorities also detained the assistant police chief of Naucalpan, a sprawling suburb of 775,000 inhabitants on the northwest edge of Mexico City.
Later, they announced the arrest of a top police chief in the suburb of Ixtapaluca, to the east of Mexico City, which has about 370,000 inhabitants.
While state prosecutors did not specify the charges against the officials, local media reported that they were accused of collusion with organized crime gangs.
The police chief’s suicide comes just days after another police official in Mexico was implicated in a crime. Last week, a former prosecutor and local police official was arrested in connection with the grisly decapitation of a mayor in southern Mexico. Officials said that Germán Reyes was arrested on charges of homicide 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, often going so far as to take a cut of the municipal budget or use local police forces to warn them or protect them from federal raids. Sometimes, police officers simply profit freelance from the drug trade.
Speaking out about cartel corruption and extortion can have deadly consequences.
In July, the head of a Mexican business chambers’ federation in Tamaulipas state, across the border from Texas, was killed hours after giving television interviews complaining about drug cartel extortion in the state. Just weeks before that, a Mexican fisheries industry leader who complained of drug cartel extortion and illegal fishing was shot to death in the northern border state of Baja California.
Last December, cartel leaders went on a killing rampage to hunt down corrupt officers who allegedly stole a drug shipment in Tijuana/