Two Jesuit Priests Gunned Down in Northern Mexico Church – Vigour Times

The killings took place near dusk Monday in the remote mountain village of Cerocahui in northern Chihuahua state, some 400 miles from the U.S. border. The region is mostly populated by members of the Tarahumara indigenous group and is a battleground for organized crime groups fighting to control the cultivation of opium and marijuana crops, and illegal logging.

State officials said the killers are believed to be members of the Sinaloa cartel. An official at the Chihuahua attorney general’s office said the priests were “collateral victims.”

The two priests tried to help a third man who entered the church fleeing from armed assailants. The attackers shot the three men, the official said. The priests,

Joaquín Mora,

80, and

Javier Campos,

79, had worked with the local community for more than three decades.

The three men were killed after four other people, among them a woman and a minor, were abducted earlier Monday, the Chihuahua government said in a statement. It was unclear if the two incidents were connected.

“It’s an area with quite a lot of organized crime,” President

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

said on Tuesday morning.

The Jesuit order condemned the killings, and demanded justice and the recovery of the bodies. “These are not isolated acts,” the Jesuit order said. “The Tarahumara Sierra, like many other regions of the country, faces conditions of violence and neglect that have not been reversed.”

The northern state of Chihuahua is among the most violent in Mexico, with 2,685 homicides registered in 2021, or 63 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with a national average of 26 per 100,000, according to government data. Bystanders and innocent people are often caught in crossfire in clashes between criminal gangs.

The Jesuit church in the village of about 1,000 people dates back to the 17th century, in a region that forms part of a popular tourist route across the Copper Canyon.

“Priests are social leaders in their communities, they often protect local people against criminals and denounce them, and that makes them a target,” said

Alejandro Solalinde,

an activist and Catholic priest.

The Jesuit mission, in a remote mountainous area, close to the states of Sonora and Sinaloa, has a school for children and a human-rights center that provides humanitarian aid to the indigenous community, said

Arturo González,

a Jesuit who knew the two priests.

Narce Santibañez, the head of communications of the Jesuit order in Mexico, said the priests had not been threatened before. “Father Campos was very charismatic, he was very popular and liked by the indigenous people. Father Mora was a man of convictions,” she said.

Priests and other members of religious organizations have long been the target of criminal gangs in Mexico. More than 50 Catholic priests have been killed since the early 1990s, seven since Mr. López Obrador took office in 2018, according to the Roman Catholic Multimedia Center, a nonprofit in Mexico City. Cardinal

Juan Jesús Posadas

was killed in 1993 in the crossfire between competing drug cartels at the Guadalajara airport. To date, no one has been arrested for the crime.

The Tarahumara region has been disputed for years by the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, with some recent incursions of the fast-growing Jalisco New Generation Cartel, state authorities say.

Mr. López Obrador came into office promising to focus on the economic roots of violence, rather than on confronting criminal groups, an approach known as “hugs not bullets.” But since then, violence has continued unabated. More than 120,000 Mexicans have been killed, many in turf wars fought between Mexico’s more than 200 organized crime groups.

Write to Juan Montes at [email protected] and José de Córdoba at [email protected]