Now it is Sheinbaum who bumps into the Church

Without yet proving to us that she is quixotic, it is President Claudia Sheinbaum ‘s turn to come up against the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

His standard tune about the cold-blooded murder of Jesuit priest Mauricio Pérez — “we regret this fact”; “we cannot speculate”; “we need investigations to be carried out” — with lyrics and music remarkably like those sung by his predecessor, have not been well received by the ecclesiastical hierarchy or the parishioners.

And you will see that next Sunday in hundreds, thousands of cathedrals, churches and parishes of the Catholic faith, your pastors, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and priests from all the archdioceses into which the country is divided will demonstrate against the violence and passivity — which sometimes seems like complicity — of the federal and state governments.

“Violence in Mexico is nothing new, it is one of the greatest scourges that has hurt us for years, and it seems that we have no respite, but rather, it is getting worse,” can be read in the weekly Desde la Fe, in its edition after the murder of the also Jesuits Javier and Joaquín , who tried to stop the criminal who killed the tourist guide Pedro Palma , just inside the Cerocahui church, in the Sierra Tarahumara, in June 2023.

There have now been three dozen murders of Catholic priests in the last six years.

More than 200,000 children, women and men have lost their lives due to violence in the last six years.

And no, the acts of the clergy are not hypocritical, a term that Andrés Manuel López Obrador recently applied to Catholic priests. Now, as the saying goes, “the griddle said to the pot.”

Because, despite the everyday nature of these criminal events — those caused by criminals as well as those “killed” by the military and police forces — many of us are still moved and even enraged by the political complicity of the 4T promoted by López Obrador and which, simulated, President Sheinbaum continues to follow, of embracing and not shooting; of respecting the human rights of criminals because, he said, they also deserve it; of calling known murderers “gentlemen”; of receiving economic resources and electoral favors in exchange for that tolerance?

“We recognize that the causes of violence in Mexico are diverse and complex: injustice, corruption, inequality and polarization are some of the foundations of this; and that, given their great complexity, they require complex actions,” reads the Catholic weekly published 20 months ago.

And we have already seen that for this we do not count on the rulers of the still incomprehensible Fourth Transformation, whether their last name is López or Sheinbaum or Escandón.

They came across the Church again, as Don Quixote told Sancho in the immortal work of Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra.

Unrecognized armed conflict

In 2024 alone, Chiapas has been the scene of attacks against priests in a context of increasing violence linked to organized crime in the region. With the recent murder of Marcelo Pérez, there are now three religious leaders who have been harassed, persecuted, injured, or violently killed in that southeastern state, according to reports and public complaints.

In January of this year, Brother Fernando Alvarado Flores, a Franciscan priest, was shot and wounded in Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán.

Father Filiberto Velázquez, who was a peace mediator between criminal organizations in the state of Guerrero, reported having been the victim of a chase on a highway in Chiapas.

On September 14, the inhabitants of Chiapas commemorated their annexation to Mexico, which in 1824 was born as a new independent country and as a Federal State.

Two centuries after such a momentous event, the people of Chiapas are fleeing to Guatemala, abandoning their homes, their animals, and their belongings due to the unleashed violence that the governments of Rutilio Escandón , AMLO, and now Sheinbaum minimize or outright ignore.

For two centuries, Chiapas has also been subjugated to its fate of marginalization, extreme poverty, political manipulation of its inhabitants and other characteristics of the Mexican system that not even the insurrection of January 1, 1994, managed to change. It made things worse, unfortunately.

A few months ago, a report was released by the Southern Border Monitoring Collective, which brings together several organizations that have been studying violence in Chiapas for years, which indicated that the border-mountain corridor was experiencing an “unrecognized armed conflict, a territorial dispute by organized crime structures for control of goods, services, people, legal and illegal products, as well as the very lives of the local population” that has led to “serious violations of human rights and international law.”

Cartels fighting over drug trafficking routes from the south of the Mexican border, control of migrant trafficking, and disputes over land grabs, invasions of arable land or land suitable for cattle raising, along with government apathy, are today the explosive cocktail that explodes daily in Chiapas and that an inactive federal government and an absent state government complicate even more.

Priests attacked and murdered.

What else is missing in that entity?

Clues

This Sunday, hours after the murder of Father Marcelo Pérez was announced, the EM Conference expressed that the cleric was a living example of the priestly commitment to the most needy and vulnerable in society and that his pastoral work was characterized by his closeness to the people and his constant support for those who needed it most. He left a legacy of love and service that will endure in the hearts of all those he touched with his ministry. “As a Church, we deeply regret the loss of a life consecrated to the service of God and neighbor. This act of violence not only affects the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, but it hurts the entire Church in Mexico and society, especially in a region that today experiences delicate situations of violence and conflict between organized crime groups.” * * * My gratitude to you who read up to these lines of the Political Index. As always, I wish you good graces and many, many days!

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