The bloody curtain on the altar
The figures are cold, but behind each number there is a stained cassock, a destroyed community. The Catholic Multimedia Center has just released shocking information: 13 priests murdered during the governments of the so-called Fourth Transformation.
Omar Sotelo Aguilar, director of the CCM, broke it down with surgical precision. Ten of these crimes occurred during López Obrador’s six-year term. Three more have joined in these first months of Claudia Sheinbaum’s government.
>Yes, it is less than the 19 during Peña Nieto’s period,” Sotelo Aguilar admitted. “But the violence has worsened.”
The long shadow of impunity
Here is the real drama, the script that repeats itself. 80% of these homicides and crimes against temples remain unpunished. Eight out of ten cases. You kill yourself and nothing happens.
The warning is clear: there is an escalation against religious spaces and against those who defend human rights from a pastoral perspective. They are not random attacks.
Two of the three priests murdered in this new six-year term—Father Marcelo Pérez in Chiapas and Father Bartolo Pantaleón Estrada in Guerrero—were known precisely for their social activism. Their pastoral work put them in the spotlight.
And the blood is not limited to the clergy. The report documents 23 more murders of lay people linked to parish activities in states such as Chiapas and Guanajuato.
My father was right. Politics—and its failure to guarantee security—ends up dripping onto the tabernacle, onto the priest who distributes hosts in a forgotten community. The national theater has a very real act where the bullets write the final dialogue.
