Bishop decries situation in Michoacan
MEXICO CITY — In a rare public airing, a senior Catholic prelate has denounced control of Mexico’s Michoacan state by violent drug traffickers, challenging official government claims and igniting a fierce debate.
Miguel Patiño, the bishop of Apatzingan, one of Michoacan’s largest cities and a headquarters for the state’s main criminal network, made his charges in an open letter and then in a series of interviews.
He said Michoacan had essentially become a failed state because authorities are afraid of — or in collusion with — organized crime figures. The state has long been dominated by a gang calling itself the Knights Templar, and its forerunner, La Familia, groups that specialized in producing methamphetamine for the U.S. market. They have branched out into rampant extortion schemes, kidnapping and other illicit activities.
In Michoacan, an “absence of law and justice” prevails, Patiño wrote, “provoking insecurity, fear, sadness, anger, mistrust, rivalries, indifference, death and oppression.”
The assorted drug cartels, he said, naming them, fight over Michoacan as if it were “spoils for the plunder.” Waves of killings, kidnappings, threats and extortion have swelled in recent months, he said, forcing entire families to f lee the state in fear.
His comments were remarkable both because they came from a senior official in the Roman Catholic Church, which more often than not has remained silent about cartels, and because they f ly in the face of more sanguine statements from the government.
Although bigger and more powerful cartels exist elsewhere in Mexico, Michoacan seems to stand alone as a place where the bad guys have sought to take over political as well as law enforce- ment power.
The bishop released his letter last month, and at Mass on Sunday he called on parishioners to overcome their terror and honor relatives who have been killed in the violence. He has reportedly received death threats for his outspokenness.
This week, Patiño was at a previously scheduled spiritual retreat elsewhere in Michoacan, church officials said. When a police contingent showed up to escort him to the retreat, rumors flew that he had been picked up by an “armed commando.”
A reinforced army presence has calmed the atmosphere a bit, the Rev. Javier Cortes Ochoa, vicar general of the church in Apatzingan, said in an interview.
In a series of newspaper and radio interviews after he made his letter public, Patiño described how the Knights Templar control everything from transit on roads to who can sell gasoline and tortillas.
“The municipal government and the police are subjugated by, or in cahoots with, the criminals, and the rumor grows steadily that the state government is also at the service of organized crime,” Patiño said. “This provokes desperation and disillusion in our society.”