MEXICO CITY — Mauricio Fernandez couldn’t have been happier.

Here he was, being sworn in again as mayor of one of Mexico’s most exclusive communities, and he had wonderful news to share: “Black Saldana, who apparently is the one who was asking for my head, was found dead today in Mexico City,” he told his cheering supporters.

The problem was the barefoot, blindfolded corpse of alleged drug lord “Black Saldana” — whose real first name is Hector — wasn’t found for another three and a half hours, according to Mexico City prosecutors. And he wouldn’t be identified for two days. Now this cartel-plagued nation, usually nonchalant about an ongoing spate of kidnappings, extortion and executions, is engrossed with this not-so-straightforward murder that links drug lords and politicians.

And the mayor is facing his own tough questions about the killings: How did he know his nemesis was dead before the authorities apparently did? Does he have associations with the cartel that may have killed the men? And what exactly did he mean when he said, during his Saturday acceptance speech, he knew Saldana and his associates wanted to hurt him, and “by fair means or foul, we are not going to accept any kind of kidnapping ... and if not, they will pay for it.”

The mayor’s initial answer, repeated in a series of interviews, was simple: “Sometimes there are coincidences in life; it’s better to look at it this way.”

But when pressed, Fernandez offered an intriguing explanation. He said U.S. authorities tipped him off somebody intercepted cartel communications and learned Saldana was planning to kill him. And he said unspecified intelligence sources told him Saldana was dead hours before the bodies were found.

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