MEXICO CITY (AP) — The police chief in a small town in central Mexico committed suicide Friday as troops closed in to arrest him as part of anticorruption raids that also detained 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 a populous suburb right on the edge of the country’s capital, where an assistant police chief was arrested.
State prosecutors said the police chief of the town of Texcaltitlan killed himself with his own weapon as marines, National Guard and soldiers closed in to try to arrest him on unspecified charges.
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And troops also arrested the mayor of the nearby town of Amanalco on “various charges.” The area around the two towns has long been dominated by the violent La Familia Michoacana gang, which deals in drugs, kidnappings and extortion.
While the first two 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.
While state prosecutors did not specify the charges against the officials, local media reported that they were accused of collusion with organized crime gangs.
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.