Felipe Calderon has bet his presidency on fighting Mexico’s drug——trafficking syndicates and their penetration of his country’s institutions. Yet for the first two and a half years of his administration, not a single elected official was arrested for complicity with the traffickers. That encouraged some of his Mexican critics to claim that his efforts were half-hearted. Now the government has started to answer them.

　　Last month troops and federal police swooped on the president’s home state of Michoacán, arresting 28 officials including ten mayors, a senior official in the prosecutor’s office and a judge. They are suspected of collaborating with La Familia, a notorious outfit that produces designer drugs and runs extortion rackets. Further arrests have followed across the country this month. Although they have not caused as much of a political stir, they involved eight employees of the prosecutor’s office in the central state of Morelos, nine soldiers suspected of providing information on troop movements to the Sinaloa mob and 98 police in Nuevo León in the north.

　　The government claims the Michoacán raid as the fruit of reforms of the federal police, who have been equipped with new investigative and intelligence units, better salaries and more leeway to strike deals with informants. Much of the evidence came from the earlier arrest of Rafael Cedeno Hernández, a leader of La Familia who also ran youth centres with the ostensible aim of preventing drug addiction.