Murders of 2 priests in Mexico rattle city gripped by violence
In this eastern Mexican oil town already weary of rising gangland violence and extortion, the abduction and murder of two priests this week sank many residents only deeper into despair.
The killings in Poza Rica, in the troubled Gulf state of Veracruz, also came at a moment of heightened tension between the Roman Catholic Church and Mexico’s government.
Church leaders are increasingly frustrated by authorities’ inability to protect their priests under President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration, and the church is openly opposing his proposal to legalize gay marriage by encouraging the faithful to join demonstrations around the country.
“This, in combination with the recent protests of gay marriage coordinated by the church, I think we’re seeing a new low point in the relationship between the church and the PRI,” said Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, referring to Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. “I think the overarching picture is that ... the open-season on priests has just proliferated with the intensification of the drug war.”
When Alejo Nabor Jimenez and Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz were found bound and shot to death outside Poza Rica on Monday, it brought to 14 the number of priests slain in Mexico since Pena Nieto took office in late 2012. At least 30 have been killed since 2006. And on Thursday church officials made a public plea for the life of yet another priest, who was reportedly kidnapped from his parish residence in the western state of Michoacan and has not been heard from since.
What exactly happened to Nabor and Suarez, and why, remains murky. Investigators have interviewed their driver who was abducted alongside them and escaped, but he has not spoken publicly.
Veracruz state prosecutor Luis Angel Bravo cited robbery as the apparent motive and said the priests had been drinking with their killers before they were abducted. That allegation infuriated the church, which saw it as the latest example of state authorities smearing victims in cursory-at-best investigations.
Bravo dismissed suggestions that a drug cartel may have been involved, although the Zetas and the Jalisco New Generation gangs are battling for control in Veracruz, including in Poza Rica.
Locals have gotten accustomed to hearing about grisly murders. The city of 195,000, has recorded 41 killings in the first eight months of this year — more than three times the toll for all 2015.