New priest killings weigh on Mexicans

Fear on rise as town mourns two slain

People sit in Our Lady of Asuncion Church in Pasa Blanco, Mexico, on Wednesday, the day of the funeral Mass for the Rev. Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz, who was found bound and shot along with another priest last week.
People sit in Our Lady of Asuncion Church in Pasa Blanco, Mexico, on Wednesday, the day of the funeral Mass for the Rev. Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz, who was found bound and shot along with another priest last week.

POZA RICA, Mexico -- The abduction and killing of two priests last week left many Poza Rica residents, already weary of rising gang violence, sinking only deeper into despair, according to interviews.

The killings in Poza Rica, an eastern Mexican oil town in the Gulf state of Veracruz, also came at a moment of heightened tension between the Roman Catholic Church and Mexico's government.

Church leaders increasingly are frustrated by authorities' inability to protect their priests under President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration, and the church is encouraging the faithful to join demonstrations around the country as it openly opposes Pena Nieto's proposal to legalize gay marriage.

"This, in combination with the recent protests of gay marriage coordinated by the church, I think we're seeing a new low point in the relationship between the church and the PRI," said Andrew Chesnut, chairman of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, referring to Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. "I think the overarching picture is that ... the open season on priests has just proliferated with the intensification of the drug war."

When Alejo Nabor Jimenez and Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz were found bound and shot to death outside Poza Rica on Monday, it raised to 14 the number of priests slain in Mexico since Pena Nieto took office in late 2012. At least 30 have been killed since 2006. And on Thursday, church officials made a public plea for the life of another priest, who reportedly was kidnapped from his parish residence in the western state of Michoacan and has not been heard from since.

What happened to Nabor and Suarez, and why, remains unclear. Investigators have interviewed their driver, who was abducted alongside them and escaped, but he has not spoken publicly.

Veracruz state prosecutor Luis Angel Bravo cited robbery as the apparent motive and said the priests had been drinking with their killers before they were abducted. That allegation infuriated the church, which saw it as the latest example of state authorities smearing victims in cursory-at-best investigations.

Bravo dismissed suggestions that a drug cartel may have been involved, although the Zetas and the Jalisco New Generation gangs are battling for control in Veracruz, including in Poza Rica.

Locals have gotten accustomed to hearing about killings. The city of 195,000 has recorded 41 killings in the first eight months of this year -- more than three times the toll for all of 2015.

Only this time the victims weren't faceless strangers assumed to be cartel operatives; they were priests, respected community leaders.

"In the newspaper, there are two or three dead every day," said a man who runs a business with a clear view of Our Lady of Fatima church, where the priests lived. "Usually you say, 'if they killed them, it was for a reason.'"

Like many people interviewed in Poza Rica, the man spoke on condition of anonymity for fear that speaking openly could make him a target for violence.

Ministering to an increasingly terrified flock, people say, Nabor threw open the doors of his church after taking up the post six years ago. Those who knew him said he was close to the congregation, sharing his phone number widely and urging people to drop in at any time.

Even at age 50, the senior priest was fond of encouraging parishioners to "seek me out at any hour you want -- for me, there is no rest," church secretary Juan Carlos Garcia said.

The 30-year-old Suarez was a fresh face in town. He arrived just a month earlier, to replace a priest who died this year of natural causes, and had taken over the church's youth programs.

Friends and parishioners were angered by the suggestion that the priests had been partying with their killers and expressed deep skepticism about the credibility of the investigation so far.

At Suarez's funeral, the Rev. Lorenzo Rivas, who attended seminary with the young priest, said the man's only vice was volleyball.

"He was not a person who liked alcohol," Rivas said.

Bravo, the prosecutor, later appeared to walk back his comments somewhat, saying he did not mean to criminalize the victims.

Several days later a woman reflected on the killings, sitting inside the business she runs just up the road from the church. Things used to be quiet in Poza Rica, the woman said, and folks never thought twice about going out at night. Now streets are all but empty after dark. She's already shortened her hours, and she's thinking of shuttering the business for good after just six months.

The priests' deaths hit hard because of their positions in the community, she said, but everyone fears they could be next.

"Really, we're all exposed to having something happen to us," she said.

Information for this article was contributed by Peter Orsi of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/25/2016

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