Mexico City police chief shot dead in ‘drug cartel hit’

Milton Morales Figueroa reportedly killed by gunmen while enjoying a family day out

Mexico City’s head of intelligence and police operations has been gunned down in an apparent drug cartel hit.
Milton Morales Figueroa, 40, is reported to have died instantly in a hail of bullets in the town of Coacalco, just north of the Mexican capital, on a family day out on Sunday.
He was hit at least twice in the head when gunmen jumped out of two SUVs with darkened windows which had suddenly pulled up as the police commander and relatives stopped at a small supermarket in a residential street. Two other people were reportedly injured. One is thought to have been a bodyguard and the other a family member.
Although it is common in Mexico for the drug cartels – who have taken de facto control of large, remote chunks of the country – to target provincial police, attacks on senior officers from the capital remain relatively rare.
The last time they did so was in 2020, when hitmen ambushed a police convoy carrying then Mexico City police chief Omar García Harfuch in the upscale Lomas de Chapultepec neighbourhood.
He was hit in the shoulder, chest and knee but survived the attack, which he later blamed on the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
It vies with the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “el Chapo” Gúzman, currently serving a life sentence plus 30 years in the United States, to be Mexico’s most powerful – and trigger-happy – organised crime group.
Both originated by smuggling cocaine and cannabis into the United States. But they have since metastasised, and now have multiple revenue streams, including extortion, kidnapping and migrant-smuggling.
They also routinely bribe and control public officials, including important figures in national politics.
Mr Morales Figueroa was a close ally of Mr García Harfuch, who has been named national head of public safety by Claudia Sheinbaum, the incoming president and former Mexico City mayor.
The pair had worked together from 2019 until earlier this year during a successful spell that saw a fall in violent crime in the capital.
Mr García Harfuch had previously held the same position as Mr Morales Figueroa, who continued his work coordinating investigations and raids on the cartels and other organised crime groups in the capital.
Recent operations under Mr Morales Figueroa included dismantling a drug retail network covering much of Mexico City and headquartered in Tepito, a central neighbourhood that has long had a ferocious reputation as a hive of criminal activity off limits to the police.
Describing his murdered colleague as a “great friend” and “extraordinary investigator,” Mr García Harfuch posted on  Twitter: “As a team, we will find those responsible, as we always have done.”