MEXICO CITY - Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church is criticizing what it
considers a campaign to smear three murdered priests by suggesting they
were involved in questionable behavior.The spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico City said Monday that reports by prosecutors and local media have sought to cover up authorities’ inability to reign in drug cartels.
Two of the slain priests were killed in Veracruz state last week.
On Sunday officials confirmed that another cleric had been shot to death in Michoacan state after being abducted.
Veracruz state prosecutors alleged that the first two priests had been drinking with their killers before they disappeared. Local media published a photo suggesting the third priest had been last seen with a young boy.
“In these cases it has become clear that state governments that cannot handle the drug cartels are criminalizing the victims, depicting some as drunks and another as a pedophile, making it look like the crimes were not related to drug cartels but because of some immoral conduct,” said Father Hugo Valdemar Romero, spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Mexico City.
“To physical death they are adding moral assassination, slandering the priests and holding them up to ridicule,” Romero said, “and that has caused deep indignation in the church,” Romero said.
Two of the slain priests were shot to death in Veracruz state last week and their bodies dumped on a roadside. On Sunday officials confirmed that the other priest had been shot to death in Michoacan state after being abducted.
Local media published a photo taken from security footage purportedly showing the priest at a hotel with a boy. But other reports later said the man in the image was not the priest.
The Michoacan state prosecutors’ office did not respond to a request for comment on the photo.
Cardinal Alberto Suarez Inda, who heads the archdiocese in Michoacan, defended his priest’s character.
“The publication of some images and malicious interpretations has made the situation more painful,” he wrote Monday.
The Mexican Council of Bishops also urged authorities to investigate the killings without casting aspersions on the victims.
“We respectfully and urgently demand that the respective authorities get to the bottom of both cases … and with the same forcefulness, we demand that no priest, or anyone, be slandered, above all before the investigations are finished,” the council wrote.
Parishioners in the Veracruz city where the two priests were killed have also said they were skeptical of the prosecutor’s account and suspected an attempt to quickly shelve the case.
Romero said of the government, “the least we expect is a public apology.”
It is unclear whether drug gangs were directly involved in last week’s killings, though most attacks on priests in Mexico in recent years have occurred in areas plagued by cartel violence.
Prosecutors have suggested the robbery of a couple hundred dollars in church collections may have been a motive in the Veracruz killings.
But Cardinal Francisco Robles Ortega of the western state of Jalisco said priests there have been subjected to extortion demands, a common practice among drug cartels in Mexico.
Mexico’s Catholic Media Center says 28 priests have been killed in Mexico since 2006, not counting last week’s slayings. It says Veracruz, Guerrero and Mexico states are the most dangerous for priests; along with Michoacan, they are some of the state with the worst drug-cartel problems.
The Michoacan state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that Father Jose Alfredo Lopez Guillen’s body was found Saturday night in an area called Las Guayabas on the highway between Puruandiro and Zinaparo.
Lopez was kidnapped last Monday, the same day authorities in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz found the bodies of two priests who had been abducted from their parish residence the previous day. They also had been shot.
Their deaths brought to at least 31 the number of priests killed in Mexico since 2006.
The Michoacan prosecutor’s office said an autopsy determined Lopez had been killed about five days before his body was found.
The Archdiocese of Morelia didn’t announce Lopez’s abduction until Thursday, and Inda, head of the archdiocese, pleaded for the priest’s safe return in a video message. Lopez’s car was found wrecked Tuesday.
On Sunday, the archdiocese reported Lopez’s death through its social media accounts and called on authorities to solve the crime.
“We lament these violent acts and the insecurity in our state,” the statement said. “We hope that authorities solve this crime.”
When earlier in the week Alejo Nabor Jimenez and Alfredo Suarez de la Cruz were found bound and shot to death outside Poza Rica on Monday, it brought to 14 the number of priests slain in Mexico since Pena Nieto took office in late 2012.