Mexico Detains Third General Tied to Drug Cartel MEXICO CITY - The Mexican government detained three high-ranking Army generals this week, including a former second in command at the Defense Ministry, suggesting the depths drug cartels have gone in trying to infiltrate one of the primary forces President Felipe Calderón has counted on to combat them. The arrests of a group of generals were without precedent in recent memory, and local news reports suggested that the corruption investigation was continuing and could net other key figures in the drug war. The three generals, Mexican officials have said, played a role in facilitating drug trafficking, and the accusations against the third general, arrested Thursday night, include that he ignored a tip by American drug agents about an imminent airplane delivery of a drug cartel's cocaine in December 2007. One of the men arrested, Tomás Ángeles Dauahare, a general who retired in 2008, was the second-highest-ranking official in the Defense Ministry during the first two years of Mr. Calderón's offensive against drug violence and had been mentioned as a possible choice for the top job. In the early 1990s, he served as the defense attaché at the Mexican Embassy in Washington. The other generals under investigation are Brig. Gen. Roberto Dawe González, assigned to a base in Colima State, and Gen. Ricardo Escorcia Vargas, who is retired. "There have been cases with military officials before, but I don't think this many at once," said Alejandro Hope, a private security analyst and a former Mexican government intelligence official. There has been worry that the more you use the military the more corruption there will be, so one purpose of this could be to send a message. The case arose from the joint effort by the United States and Mexico to cripple a major cartel funneling cocaine to the United States, the Beltrán Leyva organization, which culminated in a December 2009 raid in which a primary leader, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, was shot to death. Perhaps the most spectacular corruption case in the past was the arrest in 1997 and subsequent conviction of Mexico's drug enforcement chief, Gen. Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, for ties to organized crime. More recently, a retired general, Juan Manuel Barragán Espinosa, was detained in February, and another general, Manuel Moreno Avina, and several soldiers he commanded are standing trial on charges of murder, torture and drug trafficking in a border town in northern Mexico. It remained unclear why the men were detained this week for acts that transpired a few years ago, and whether there were more recent allegations of wrongdoing. Federal prosecutors have 40 days to present formal charges; their lawyers have told local reporters they will be exonerated. General Ángeles had recently appeared at a security forum put on by a nonprofit group with ties to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, whose candidate for president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is leading by a wide margin in polls ahead of the July 1 election. Mr. Peña Nieto said the generals had played no role in his campaign, though General Ángeles served in Washington in the early 1990s under a former ambassador, Jorge Montaño, who is the party's foreign affairs adviser and has met with policy makers and analysts in recent weeks in Washington. American law enforcement officials tend to work more closely with the Mexican Navy, perceived as a cleaner institution, and in a diplomatic cable in 2010 the American ambassador at the time specifically complained about the Army's reluctance to act on intelligence that drug agents had obtained on the Beltrán Leyva cartel. The Mexican marines instead carried out the raid, and the ambassador, Carlos Pascual, resigned in a furor after the cable was publicly revealed through WikiLeaks in 2011. Analysts were struck as much by Mexico's effort to round up the men as the possibility that officers of such high stature could be on the take. The government has been criticized in the past for tolerating abuses in the military and moving slowly to weed out bad apples. "Other people will say, "Oh my, isn't this terrible; there's corruption," " said Robert C. Bonner, a former Drug Enforcement Administration chief, who did not recall meeting the men. But the cartels have been attempting to corrupt and have corrupted officials before. This is what Mexico needs to do. It needs to identify the corrupt officials and put them behind bars. I am encouraged because they are not trying to sweep this under the rug. Mr. Calderón has dispatched Army soldiers to violent regions to supplement and sometimes replace corrupt local and state police forces. The move has drawn criticism that they are ill prepared for police work, and human rights groups and the State Department have raised concerns about the use of lethal force and the disappearances of young men last seen in their custody. But analysts said it would be more troubling if the officers belonged to the Navy, which has been critical in the arrest and killing of some of the most-wanted kingpins. "The Army is more like muscle; the Navy is more about intelligence operations," said a former American law enforcement official. General Ángeles figured in the arrest of another high-ranking official, General Rebollo, Mexico's drug enforcement chief in the late 1990s. General Rebollo at the time testified about meetings between other generals and traffickers, and General Ángeles, in an interview with The New York Times in 1998, hotly disputed the account as the general's desperate attempt to throw blame for his actions on others. "The claim that there were other meetings is false," he said, going on to call the allegations "lies, slander and infamy."