Originally published at National Catholic Register
The Catholic Multimedia Center (CCM, by its Spanish acronym), an organization that tracks violence against members of the Church in Mexico, released a report Dec. 9 documenting that since 1990 some 80 Catholic priests have been murdered in the country.
The director of CCM, Father Omar Sotelo Aguilar, during a press conference in which he presented the report, noted that “as never before in the history of Mexico, violence has reached worrying levels, striking all sectors of society.”
Between 2018 and 2024, during the six-year term of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — founder of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA, by its Spanish acronym) party — homicides reached their highest level in modern Mexican history, totaling 199,621. The surge in violence took place during the implementation of López Obrador’s controversial policy of “abrazos, no balazos“ (“hugs, not bullets”) against organized crime.
The idea behind the strategy was to address the root causes of the violence with social programs rather than cracking down on the drug cartels through vigorous enforcement of the law.
This context of violence and “the power vacuum and the dismantling of the rule of law,” the priest said, has forced pastoral workers, laypeople, priests, and ministers
