MEXICO CITY (BP) — Ten Catholic priests and a seminarian were murdered during the six-year term of former Mexican President López Obrador that ended Sept. 30, the Catholic Multimedia Center said in its 2024 annual report.

Seven bishops and seven additional priests were violently attacked during the same period but survived, the center said, chronicling concurrent attacks on churches and holy sites that mark “an escalation of aggressions that demonstrate the progressive desacralization and absence of any respect towards the holy and sacred.”

One priest has been killed since President Claudia Sheinbaum began his term in October, namely Marcelo Pérez Pérez of the San Cristóbal de las Casas Diocese.

“His assassination was not circumstantial, nor was it ‘collateral damage,’” the report noted, “and, in a cunning manner, it showed that his pastoral actions and activity in favor of human rights was inconvenient to those who cut short his existence.”

While persecution of Catholics in Mexico is not disputed, report authors Guillermo Gazanini Espinoza, head of multimedia center information, and multimedia center Director Sergio Omar Sotelo Aguilar, describe the persecution as special to Catholics alone.

“Catholic priests in Mexico continue to be treated as second-class citizens, while other ministers of worship, whether from religious groups or ideological movements, enjoy freedom, without any sanction, to express their civic opinions,” the two wrote in the report’s prologue. “This is an affront to freedom of conscience and the rights of democratic participation that are permitted by our Constitution.”

Reports by international religious liberty advocates agree that Mexico is dangerous for Catholic priests, but also cite persecution of others, including Indigenous groups and any religious leaders who advocate for morality.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, in its 2023 report on Religious Freedom for Indigenous Communities in Latin America, noted persecution of Indigenous communities in Mexico. Currently, about 150 Baptists are displaced from their indigenous villages in Hidalgo, Mexico, after leaders in the majority Catholic area reneged on an agreement that would have allowed them to return home. Baptist pastors and others have been severely beaten.

The U.S. State Department, in its 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom, cited the multimedia center’s statistics from an earlier report tallying 800 incidents of extortion and threats against priests in Mexico between October 2022 and October 2023.

The State Department also reported that “incidents of violence against religious leaders did not appear to be based solely on religious identity,” referencing Mexico’s National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination. “Some NGOs said cartels and other criminal groups continued to single out Catholic priests and other religious leaders because of their condemnation of criminal activities and because communities viewed them as moral authority figures.”

Still, the Catholic Multimedia Center’s report shows widespread persecution of Catholics in Mexico, documenting almost 900 cases of Roman Catholic ministers and church workers being extorted or threatened, and 26 attacks on religious buildings during Obrador’s presidency.

Christian persecution watchdog group CSW, in announcing the report, called on the Mexican government to protect Catholic priests and other religious leaders from harm.

The Catholic Multimedia Center “has been documenting this trend for almost 35 years and it is of deep concern that attacks on priests and religious leaders spiked and have remained steadily high over the past three presidential administrations, with no real sign of improvement,” CSW’s Director of Advocacy Anna Lee Stangl said.

“We stand in solidarity with (the center) in calling for the international community, in collaboration with the Mexican government,” she said, “to effectively address the various factors, including impunity, corruption and the proliferation of violent organized criminal groups involved in the international trafficking of human beings, weapons and drugs, that have made Mexico one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a Catholic priest.”

According to Mexico’s 2020 census, 78% of the population is Catholic, 10% is Protestant or evangelical Protestant, and 1.5% are aligned with other religious groups, including Judaism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Islam. Just over 8% described themselves as nonreligious, and 2.5% said they practice an unspecified religion. The U.S. State Department estimated Mexico’s population was 130 million in 2023.

The report, in Spanish, is linked here.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)