The last time Tulum drug-tested its police, three officers lost their jobs

A surprise Tulum police drug test covered 100 officers on September 28, applied inside the department by a team from the Centro de Control y Confianza in Chetumal.

Edgar Aguilar Rico, secretary of public security and citizen protection, said C3 personnel arrived at the corporation's facilities to take the samples, and that he gave one himself. He presented the exam as part of the work of making the force credible to the people it polices.

This was the first surprise toxicology exam in the time Aguilar Rico has run the department, which he counted as a year and four months. By the records he reviewed, the corporation had gone more than three years without an evaluation of this kind. The samples went back to Chetumal, and what the C3 finds in them will decide whether any of the 100 stays in uniform.

A team from Chetumal, and no advance warning

The Centro de Control y Confianza is the state body that evaluates the integrity and the fitness of serving officers. It operates out of Chetumal, about 250 kilometers south of Tulum, and its staff travel to the corporations rather than calling officers down to the capital. In Tulum, they went to the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública y Protección Ciudadana and collected the samples on the premises.

Tulum was not the C3's only stop.

On September 24, Por Esto reported that close to a hundred municipal police of Othón P. Blanco had been tested during the 8 a.m. roll call at their general directorate in Chetumal, by specialized personnel from the same center. That directorate has said nothing about results, or about how many of its officers might face sanctions.

The state has run the same play before. In April 2025, the Secretaría de Seguridad Ciudadana de Quintana Roo conducted random drug tests on 700 officers in Chetumal and Cancún, with medical and chemical staff from the C3 arriving at the installations early in the morning. The purpose given then was the same as the one Aguilar Rico gives now: keeping people in the ranks only while they stay clean.

Aguilar Rico gave a sample too

The secretary made his own participation the center of the announcement.

"It is necessary to tell all of Tulum that the members of this corporation, myself included, since I took the drug test, so that the residents of Tulum have the certainty that they have a certified and reliable police force and, above all, one that works for legal certainty," he said, speaking in Spanish.

Certainty carries weight in this particular office. Aguilar Rico was sworn in on July 2, 2025, after the post had sat empty for more than three months. His predecessor, José Roberto Rodríguez Bautista, was shot in the La Veleta neighborhood on the night of March 21, 2025, and died in a hospital hours later. The state attorney general's office announced the arrest of one of the alleged attackers at the end of that month.

The municipality has been staging its security push in public. On September 29, the day after the samples were taken, Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo handed ballistic jackets, rain gear and vehicles to the force and to the tourist police unit, and credited officers with an 80 percent drop in crime.

The last Tulum police drug test was in February 2022

The precedent is on the record, and it predates this administration. On February 14, 2022, the state's Dirección de Control y Confianza set up at the Dirección General de Seguridad Pública y Tránsito Municipal in Tulum and conducted 275 tests after roll call, as part of the paperwork to renew the force's collective firearms license under article 26 of the federal firearms law.

Three officers came back positive for marijuana and were removed. Óscar Alberto Aparicio Avendaño, who led the corporation at the time, told reporters that the files went to internal affairs and from there to the Consejo de Honor y Justicia, the body that formalizes a dismissal. He said the tests would continue at random.

By the account Aguilar Rico gave, they did not.

The scale moved as well. The 2022 round covered 275 officers, and this one covered 100. Neither the department nor the C3 has said what share of the current force that represents.

Sanction or dismissal, once the findings come back

Mexican law ties an officer's permanence in a police force to passing control and confidence evaluations, which is why a toxicology result travels outside the department before anyone acts on it. Aguilar Rico described what follows a positive sample as a legal matter rather than an immediate firing.

"The legal process will surely have to be carried out, taking the part that corresponds on the matter of the sanction, or the corresponding dismissal," he said.

Until the official findings arrive from Chetumal, the department's legal area has nothing to open. Aguilar Rico said it is not yet known whether any officer has tested positive, and the Secretaría has not reported a single positive result. Any measure, administrative or otherwise, waits on paper that is still in another city.

He said the results would be delivered in the coming days. A week has gone by since the C3 team left with the samples, and nothing has been published. Until the findings come back from Chetumal, the 100 officers who gave samples are working their shifts with the question open, and so is the secretary who gave one beside them.

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