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 a mayor in other towns.
The massive, near-simultaneous raids, which federal officials called “Operation Swarm,” 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.
The federal Public Safety Department said the seven officials arrested “were linked to criminal groups.” and were accused of “crimes like extortion, kidnaping and homicide.” It was not clear if formal charges had been filed against them yet.
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.
And 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 those towns has long been dominated by the violent La Familia Michoacana gang, which deals in drugs, kidnapping 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.
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.