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.
