During an anticorruption raid, a Mexican police chief commits suicide as forces approach in to take him into custody

As troops were ready to arrest him as part of anticorruption raids that also detained a number of other top police commanders and mayors in neighboring towns, the police head of a small town in central Mexico committed suicide on Friday.

The massive, almost simultaneous operations, dubbed Operation Swarm, took place in two populated neighborhoods outside of Mexico City and two rural communities in the State of Mexico, west of Mexico City.

The federal Public Safety Department claims that the seven detained officials were charged with killing, kidnapping, and extortion and were connected to criminal organizations. Whether formal charges had been brought against them yet remained unknown.

As troops, Marines, and the National Guard came in to arrest him on unspecified charges, the police chief of Texcaltitlan, one of the outlying villages, committed suicide with his own gun, state prosecutors said.

Along with the police chief and another local official, troops also detained the mayor of the adjoining town of Amanalco on a number of allegations. Further south, at Tejupilco, they also detained the police chief.

The area around those villages has long been controlled by the infamous La Familia Michoacana cartel, which deals in extortion, drug trafficking, and kidnapping.

Authorities also arrested the assistant police chief of Naucalpan, a sizable community of 775,000 people on the northwest outskirts of Mexico City, even though some of the raids were directed towards rural areas.

Later, they declared that a well-known police chief in Ixtapaluca, a 370,000-person suburb east of Mexico City, had been arrested.

Days after another Mexican police official was accused of a crime, the police head committed suicide. A former prosecutor and local police officer was arrested last week in relation to the vicious beheading of a southern Mexican mayor. A week after becoming mayor of Chilpancingo, the state capital, Germ Reyes was arrested on homicide charges, according to officials, for the murder of Alejandro Arcos.

In the past, gangs and drug cartels have typically offered a share of the municipal budget or used local police forces to warn or shield them from federal raids in order to infiltrate, pressure, or bribe local officials to work for them. On their own, police personnel can occasionally make money from the drug trade.

It might be lethal to speak out against cartel extortion and corruption.

The chairman of a Mexican business chambers federation in Tamaulipas state, which is on the other side of the Texas border, was killed in July just hours after voicing his displeasure on television regarding drug cartel extortion in his state. A few weeks earlier, in Baja California, the northern border state of Mexico, a leader of the country’s fishing industry was killed for warning against illegal fishing and drug gang extortion.

To find dishonest officers who allegedly stole a shipment of drugs in Tijuana, cartel leaders went on a murderous rampage last December.

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