Catholic priest Marcelo Perez was returning home from church on Sunday when two men on a motorcycle pulled alongside his vehicle and shot him, prosecutors in the southern state of Chiapas said.
“Father Marcelo has been a symbol of resistance and has stood alongside the communities of Chiapas for decades, defending the dignity and rights of the people and working toward true peace,” the Jesuits, Perez’s religious order, said in a statement.
The killing comes amid a period of heightened violence in the southern state, which recorded about 500 murders between January and August this year.
Along with the rights of Indigenous people and farmworkers, the Jesuits said Perez was also a vocal critic of organised criminal groups.
“This region doesn’t just suffer from murders, but also forced recruitment (into criminal groups), kidnappings, threats and ransacking of its natural resources,” the religious order said.
Mexican human rights activists and environmental defenders have long condemned violent harassment and intimidation by criminal groups and state security forces.
Perez was himself a member of the Tzotzil Indigenous peoples and had served the community in Chiapas for two decades, developing a reputation as someone who could help settle disputes, especially over land.
“We will collaborate with all the authorities so his death doesn’t go unpunished and those guilty face the courts,” Chipas Governor Rutilio Escandon said in a social media post, calling the assassination “cowardly”.
But in Mexico, accountability for murder is the exception rather than the rule, with about 95 percent of all homicides going unsolved.
Rights activists and Indigenous land defenders face high levels of violence and intimidation in Mexico.
A 2023 Amnesty International report found that those groups face high levels of criminalisation and persecution as part of a “broader strategy of disincentivizing and dismantling advocacy for land, territorial and environmental rights”.
The rights group also said Mexico “ranks among the countries with the highest number of murders of environmental defenders”.
On Sunday, the United Nations human rights office in Mexico said “several national and international organizations had publicly warned about the growing number of threats, attacks and acts of criminalization against” Perez, the priest.
It said those threats “have intensified in recent years due to his tireless work in favor of justice and the rights of Indigenous peoples”.