Church in Mexico calls on government to protect the people from drug cartel violence

Tapachula, Mexico, on the southern border with Guatemala. / Credit: Dmitrijs Kaminskis/Shutterstock

ACI Prensa Staff, Jul 30, 2024 / 12:15 pm (CNA).

Faced with the “desperate” situation of violence in the Mexican state of Chiapas “due to the permanent presence of drug cartels,” the Catholic Church has urgently called on the authorities to “protect our people.”

In a July 24 statement Bishop Jaime Calderón Calderon of Tapachula, a diocese located on the southern border of Mexico with Guatemala, said the situation that people face daily in the region is intolerable.

The prelate pointed out that families are being “confined to their own homes, forced to do what they shouldn’t” in the face of the incomprehensible reality in which they are living, where “the cartels have control of the population at will.”

The bishop said that families are being forced to “pay the cartel protection money depending on where they live” and are forced to “take part in checkpoints that prevent the free flow of traffic.” 

Calderón also said that people must “pay very high prices for scarce merchandise” sold in businesses that the cartels extract payments from their profits so they can keep their doors open.

Calderón charged that on July 20 and July 22 people were “intimidated, threatened, and forced to participate as human shields in the confrontations between the drug cartels.”

According to the news outlet Insight Crime, control of the state of Chiapas on the border with Guatemala is disputed by crime gangs known as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel.

“Poverty and neglect for decades, combined with the ambition for easy money, has been the breeding ground that is leading to this desperate situation, suffering, and the slow death of our brothers in the Foranía Sierra,” the prelate charged.

This area, which is part of the Diocese of Tapachula, includes 10 parishes located in the Sierra Madre of Chiapas, which extends through southeast Mexico and goes into parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

“The situation is desperate; it’s very difficult to live like this,” Calderón lamented.

Recently, the Guatemalan Institute of Migration noted an influx of people migrating from Mexico.

According to monitoring by the government agency, more than 500 people, including women, men, girls, boys, and older adults, “have been forcibly displaced to Guatemala due to the violence that plagues the southern part of the neighboring country.”

The Church’s appeal to the authorities

Calderón criticized the inaction of the security forces in charge of protecting the citizens, accusing them of doing “nothing for the population whom they see suffering day after day.”

The prelate charged that in the region there is a permanent presence of cartels fighting over Foranía Sierra, where they are “coming and going throughout the territory in the face of the indifference and apparent complicity of the National Guard and the Mexican Army with the complacency of federal and state government.”

Calderón asked: “What do you need to break out of your indifference and defend the people who trusted you with their vote so that you would take care of them? How long are you going to go on trying to hide a sad and painful reality that we are loaded down with day after day?”

“We ask you, we beg you, we implore you, to fulfill your duty and protect our people,” he pleaded.

In addition, the bishop expressed his hope that the period of transition from the current government to the newly elected one will not serve as an excuse “for us to be forgotten by the next administration but rather that the incoming government will have a good memory, keep us in mind, and not forget us who have already suffered too much.”

In the recent July 2 elections, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected president of Mexico and Óscar Eduardo Aguilar Ramírez was elected governor of Chiapas; both are members of the Morena political party.

However, the Morena government has faced criticism for failing to mitigate violence.

The leader of Morena, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is ending his six-year term marked by one of the most violent periods in modern Mexican history with 193,273 homicides recorded since December 2018.

Similarly, current Chiapas governor Rutilio Escandón Cadenas has reported 3,386 homicides in the state, according to the report “MX: The War in Numbers,” prepared by T-ResearchMX.

‘What is God telling us in face of this reality?’

Calderón noted that “the presence of God sustains, encourages, and nourishes the hope of those who await new times, times of tranquility, times of joy, times of peace.”

The bishop stressed that, despite the difficulties faced by communities, such as the cartel violence or the indifference of the authorities, faith remains a source of hope.

“When the situation is most difficult, when it seems that no one cares about what we are experiencing, when we feel that we have nothing to free ourselves from the yoke of those who subjugate us, when we suffer from the indifference of those who make their living by charging us for protection, when it seems that our duty is to resign ourselves, lose hope, give up, and wait for death, a light of hope must shine on the horizon, the light of the presence of God,” the bishop said.

Calderón stressed that “God will not abandon us; God our Father will have mercy on us” and therefore asked the people to “go on living and committing ourselves to continue building a horizon of hope.”

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.