Mexican media are reporting on the arrest of Nahum Acosta, an aide to President Vicente Fox and key member of the National Action Party (PAN) in the border state of Sonora, a notorious drug hotspot favored by the Tijuana cartel:

Federal authorities have detained the head of President Vicente Fox’s travel staff on suspicions he was feeding information to drug lords, Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said Saturday.

Nahúm Acosta, director of the office coordinating presidential tours, was arrested by federal agents Thursday as he left his office at the presidential residence, Los Pinos. He may have passed at least part of Fox’s travel plans to a narcotics trafficking organization, though Macedo de la Concha refused to say which one.

“We realized that there were factors that indicated a leak of information from inside the president of the republic’s office, basically in the form of how the president traveled around diverse parts of the nation,” the attorney general told reporters after appearing at an event with Fox in the central state of Queretaro.

Hours after Macedo de la Concha spoke Saturday, police and federal agents raided Acosta’s home in an exclusive Mexico City neighborhood, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) said in a statement. It did not say whether any evidence was seized, however, and a spokesman could not provide further details.

A leak within the president’s office indicates that drug traffickers, who often kill federal, state and local officials with impunity, may have been directly targeting the president.

The arrest comes on the heels of increasing violence at the border and bristling recriminations from Mexico in response to our State Department’s warnings to Americans about the dangers of traveling south of the border.

Two Americans were found dead in Matamoros on Friday. And the Washington Post notes the most recent outbreaks of violence and chaos across the country:

In separate incidents Saturday, three police officers and a teen were shot dead Saturday in the resort city of Acapulco in violence authorities said could be linked to local elections on Sunday, the Reuters news agency reported.

Two gunmen in a car killed a police officer and a teenage boy near the airport, and in a separate incident, three gunmen opened fire on two police officers in downtown Acapulco, killing them both. Shortly afterward, someone threw a grenade at an police station, injuring some passengers in a bus, police spokesman Enrique Martinez told Reuters.

Mexico’s main opposition party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is battling to retain the governor’s seat in Guerrero state, and political commentators have warned of election-related violence over concerns about possible vote-rigging.

Looks like the Mexican government doth protest too much.

Meanwhile, controversy continues to brew over the impending marriage of U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Antonio Garza to Mexican heiress Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala, worth an estimated $1.5 billion as vice chairwoman of the Modelo Group brewing company, which includes the famous Corona and Negra Modelo beers.

“It’s going to be a real power couple. She’s very rich and he’s very ambitious politically,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, an expert in U.S.-Mexico relations and editor of the Spanish-language edition of Foreign Affairs magazine.

“It will be interesting to see how this plays out,” Fernandez said. “It reflects the new reality of U.S.-Mexico relations. We’re so intertwined, I don’t see any conflict of interest.”

Oh, really?

Update: More from Gringo Unleashed!, who keeps an eye on Spanish-language media. (Hat tip: Tigerhawk)

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