2 Jesuit priests killed in church in northern Mexico

Two Jesuit priests have been killed inside a church where a man pursued by gunmen apparently sought refuge in a remote mountainous area of northern Mexico, the religious order’s Mexican branch announced Tuesday.

Javier Campos Morales and Joaquín César Mora Salazar were killed Monday inside the church in Cerocahui, Chihuahua.

Violence has plagued the Tarahumara mountains for years. Cerocahui is near a point where Chihuahua state meets Sonora and Sinaloa, a major drug producing region.

A statement from the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus in Mexico demanded justice and the return of the men’s bodies. It said gunmen had taken them from the church.

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“Acts like these are not isolated,” the statement said. “The Tarahumara mountains, like many other regions of the country, face conditions of violence and abandonment that have not been reversed. Every day men and women are arbitrarily deprived of life, as our murdered brothers were today.”

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said during his daily news conference Tuesday that the priests were apparently killed by gunmen pursuing another man who sought refuge in the church. That man was also killed, the president said.

López Obrador said authorities have information about possible suspects in the killings and that the area has a strong organized crime presence.

For some reason, the gunmen did not kill a third priest who was at the church, but refused his pleas for them to leave the bodies of his two colleagues, said Narce Santibañez, the press director for the Jesuits in Mexico.

The surviving priest said his two colleagues had been killed with gunshots at close range.

The killing of priests has been a persistent tragedy in Mexico, at least since the start of the drug war in 2006.

The Rev. Gilberto Guevara serves in the parish of Aguililla in the western state of Michoacan, a town which has been on the front lines of cartel turf wars for years. Three priests have been killed in the area over the last decade.

“The danger is always there,” Guevara said about working in the cartel-dominated region. “As long as we don’t get in the way, they respect us, just as the government respects as as long as we are useful to them.”

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The church’s Catholic Multimedia Center said seven priests have been murdered under the current administration, which took office in December 2018, and at least two dozen under the former president, who took office in 2012.

The center said that in 2021, a Franciscan priest died when he was caught in the crossfire of a drug gang shootout in the north-central state of Zacatecas as he drove to Mass. Another priest was killed in the central state of Morelos and another in the violence-plagued state of Guanajuato that year.

In 2019, a priest was stabbed to death in the northern border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.

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Chihuahua Gov. Maria Eugenia Campos wrote in her Twitter account that she “laments and condemns” the killings, and said security arrangements had been discussed for priests in the area.