Chiapas mourns priest killed in state rocked by cartel violence: 'They want to intimidate us' | Mexico

Amid incense and white lilies, thousands of mourners crowded the city center of San Andrés Larráinzar in the Mexican mountain state of Chiapas.

They had come to say goodbye to a beloved priest who was seen as a peacemaker in a region wracked by violence.

Visible in a half-open coffin draped with an embroidered stole was the bandaged head of Father Marcelo Pérez, who was shot dead early Sunday as he left mass in the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

“He not only saw the injustices against the poor, he denounced them,” Bishop Raúl Vera said at Tuesday’s funeral mass, which was held in Spanish and Tzotzil, the victim’s indigenous language. “He died because of his prophetic word.”

Pérez was one of the rare leaders willing to speak out against those responsible for abusing the state's indigenous communities. Just a month before his death, he led a mass march to the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, to demand peace.

“With everything that is happening in Chiapas, it is a blow to the struggles for peace and community organization,” said Jorge Santiago, a theologian and adviser to the Diocese of San Cristóbal.

Pérez is the first priest in recent history to be killed in the diocese of San Cristóbal, but Chiapas has a long history of unrest.

San Cristóbal was the epicenter of the Zapatista uprising in 1994, when thousands of masked indigenous insurgents took over the city on New Year's Day. The uprising, inspired in part by the liberation theology of local priests and led by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, resulted in the largest land redistribution in Chiapas history, returning 250,000 hectares of land to the indigenous population.

But in the years that followed, the Mexican state funded paramilitary groups that launched a series of bloody reprisals against Zapatista communities and allies. On December 22, 1997, dozens of people from a pacifist religious community were slaughtered while praying in the village of Acteal.

Guadalupe Vásquez Luna, a survivor of the massacre, recalled that Pérez visited the community every month on the 22nd to commemorate the victims.

“They killed him because he was an obstacle, because they wanted to intimidate us,” Vásquez Luna said.

In recent years, bloodshed has only increased in Chiapas, whose location on the border with Guatemala makes it a strategic area for trafficking in migrants, drugs and weapons.

Under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Chiapas became another battleground for Mexico's two most powerful organized crime groups, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, bringing with them high-profile weapons and a new level of aggression.

Entire villages have been displaced and more than 1,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in the last nine months. The conflict has become so intense that around 500 people fled across the border to find safety in Guatemala earlier this year, reversing a historic flow of migration north.

“When we talk to people from other states, they say, 'They are experiencing what we went through 20 years ago,'” said Jose Luis Vizares, vicar of the diocese's Office of Justice and Peace. “We tried to stop it, but it happened so quickly.”

As an experienced mediator, Pérez intervened in conflicts that the authorities avoided. Miguel Sánchez Diaz, a former mayor of the municipality of Bochil, recalled the priest's intervention after a murder in 2021. “The prosecution could not enter to recover the body. The father lured himself into the community and gave this person a holy burial,” he said.

Pérez knew his work was making enemies. In 2015 he applied for protection from the Swedish Reconciliation Association. The organization documented near-constant threats: men on motorcycles followed the priest; His car's brakes and tires were tampered with.

At the same time, he was persecuted by state authorities who wanted to discredit his work. Prosecutors accused him of having close ties to an indigenous self-defense militia accused of forcibly disappearing 21 people during a conflict with an organized crime group. An arrest warrant was issued against him, but it was never executed.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ordered the Mexican government to protect the priest. Police cars guarded his home and he carried a panic button. However, the measures were not enough. As he wanted to drive away after mass on Sunday, a man came to his car window and shot him.

The federal government announced the deployment of 200 additional soldiers to Chiapas and a murder suspect was arrested on Tuesday. But few expect the violence to end.

After the funeral, the crowd filed into the churchyard to say their final goodbyes. They cried and threw confetti and flower petals at the coffin. A brass band played a march, mourners waved copal incense and as the coffin was lowered into the ground they shouted, “Father Marcelo is alive!”

“The Mexican state wanted to kill him, but he is a seed,” Sánchez Luna said. “Today we plant the body of Father Marcelo and thousands will grow.”