The newly elected mayor of Chilpancingo, Mexico, had appointed Germán Reyes as the man who would safeguard his city.
But on Tuesday, the Mexican authorities arrested Mr. Reyes, a retired military officer and former prosecutor, accusing him of ordering the mayor’s brutal killing in southwest Mexico last month in a case that had already shocked a nation reeling from widespread violence against local politicians.
The mayor, Alejandro Arcos Catalán, 43, took office in Chilpancingo, the capital of Guerrero state in southwest Mexico, but disappeared less than a week later. On Oct. 6, his head was found on top of a white pickup, local officials said. The rest of his body was in the front seat of the vehicle.
State prosecutors on Tuesday announced the arrest of Mr. Reyes, 46, the city’s security chief, on a charge of aggravated homicide, saying he colluded with a local criminal group to abduct and assassinate the mayor.
“The fact that the government, at least at the municipal level, may be influenced by a third party to make public security decisions already suggests that the rule of law is at risk,” said José Filiberto Velázquez, a local minister and the director of the Minerva Bello human rights group in Guerrero, one of the poorest and most violent states in Mexico.
During a brief recess in court on Tuesday, Mr. Reyes told reporters that the charge was “absurd.” He said that Mr. Arcos Catalán interviewed him in late September for the job of public security minister and appointed him the next day.
Mr. Reyes also said that the day of Mr. Arcos Catalán’s death, he himself was eating at a seafood restaurant south of Chilpancingo when his officers informed him that a decapitated body had been found.
Shortly before the gruesome discovery last month, a City Council official was gunned down in the street. Days earlier, armed men shot and killed Ulises Hernández, a former head of police special forces unit in Guerrero and Mr. Arcos Catalán’s original pick as the city’s public security minister.
Mr. Hernández’s replacement was Mr. Reyes, local officials said, a former prosecutor best known for leading the 2022 investigation into a massacre of 20 people in San Miguel Totolapan, a city northwest of Chilpancingo. To date, no arrests have been made in that case.
Mexico’s security minister, Omar García Harfuch, said in a news conference last month that the day Mr. Arcos Catalán was killed, he was traveling alone, “without escorts, without a driver,” to a meeting in the community of Petaquillas, a stronghold of Los Ardillos, a local criminal group.
Prosecutors on Tuesday said that Mr. Reyes was colluding with that group. The order to kill the mayor, they said, came after Mr. Arcos Catalán refused to appoint people who the criminal organization wanted in his cabinet.
In an interview, a member of Mr. Reyes’s defense team questioned the evidence provided by prosecutors, saying it was based mostly on the account of a witness who supposedly had overheard a phone conversation in which an alleged cartel member mentioned Mr. Reyes’s name. The lawyer asked not to be identified because of fear of retaliation by local criminal groups.
The witness, a local merchant, was found dead this month, according to local news reports.
Mr. Arcos Catalán’s case is, so far, the most gruesome killing of a Mexican politician since the inauguration of Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, at the start of October. It brought back memories of the tactics used in the darkest days of Mexico’s drug war, when criminals publicly displayed dismembered bodies to terrorize the population.
Ms. Sheinbaum, who has promised to curb cartels’ rampant violence, has faced a bloody first month in office, with some parts of the country, such as Sinaloa state, turning into a war zone between rival criminal groups, putting pressure on her to act.
“It won’t be from one day to the next, but results will be noticed,” she told reporters on Tuesday when speaking about her government’s security strategy. The key, she said, is “placing a lot of emphasis on intelligence and investigation to produce results that lead to arrests.”
Chilpancingo, a city of more than 300,000 people, has been a battleground for rival cartels fighting to infiltrate and dominate the local economy.
Last week, prosecutors identified the dismembered bodies of seven adults and four minors that had been abandoned in the back of a pickup earlier this month in Chilpancingo.
Mr. García Harfuch, Mexico’s security minister, said in a news conference on Tuesday that Los Ardillos were also responsible for these killings.
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