ACUME, Mexico, (Reuters) – Mexican drug traffickers  fighting a brutal turf war are attacking priests and preachers  who denounce cartel violence, shattering clerics’ untouchable  aura and breaking honor codes in the world’s second-biggest  Catholic country.

Gunmen killed a Catholic priest and two seminary students  as they left a church in southern Mexico in early June.

Around 1,000 Catholic priests face constant threats from  drug gangs across Mexico and as many as 400 have been directly  warned to silence their criticisms of narco violence and  extortions or be killed, the Mexican Bishop’s Conference says.

Although the murdered seminary students are suspected of  family ties to drug gangs, most priests say they are targeted  for urging parishioners to stand up to traffickers.

“They threatened to burn me and my family alive,” said  evangelist pastor Bartolome Garcia, who fled a lawless hamlet  where he worked near Tijuana on the U.S. border last year.

“They don’t like it that we preach and criticize them,”  said Garcia, who preaches to farmers and the elderly in the  bleak, semi-abandoned village of Jacume yards from the U.S.  border fence. Some 12,300 people have died across Mexico in a three-way  war between rival cartels and the military since President  Felipe Calderon sent thousands of troops to try to crush the  cartels on taking office in December 2006.