Amid incense and white lilies, thousands of mourners gathered in the city center of San Andrés Larrainzar, in Mexico’s mountainous southern state of Chiapas.
They had come to say goodbye to a beloved priest known as a peacemaker in a region ravaged by violence.
A half-open casket, draped with an embroidered stole, revealed the bandaged head of Father Marcelo Pérez, who was shot early Sunday as he left Mass in the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas.
“He not only saw the injustice against the poor, he denounced them,” Bishop Raul Vera said Tuesday during the funeral Mass, held in Spanish and Tzotzil, the victim’s native language. “He died because of his prophetic word.”
Pérez was a rare leader willing to speak out against those responsible for the abuse of the state’s indigenous communities. Just a month before his death, he led a massive march to the state capital Tuxtla Gutierrez to demand peace.
“Amid all that is happening in Chiapas, it is a blow to the struggle for peace and community organization,” said theologian Jorge Santiago, advisor to the Diocese of San Cristóbal.
Pérez is the first priest in recent history to be murdered in the diocese of San Cristóbal, but Chiapas has a long history of unrest.
San Cristóbal was the epicenter of the Zapatista uprising in 1994, when thousands of masked indigenous insurgents took the city on New Year’s Day. The uprising, inspired in part by liberation theology taught by local priests and led by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, resulted in the largest land redistribution in Chiapas history, with 250,000 hectares of land returned to the indigenous population.
But in subsequent years, the Mexican state funded paramilitary groups that launched a series of bloody reprisals against Zapatista communities and allies. On December 22, 1997, dozens of people from a pacifist religious community were massacred while praying in the village of Acteal.
Guadalupe Vásquez Luna, a survivor of the massacre, recalled that Pérez visited the community every month on the 22nd to commemorate the victims.
“They killed him because he was an obstacle, because they wanted to intimidate us,” Vásquez Luna said.
In recent years, the bloodshed has only escalated in Chiapas, where its location on the border with Guatemala makes it a strategic area for the trafficking of migrants, drugs and weapons.
Under former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Chiapas became yet another battleground for Mexico’s two most powerful organized crime factions, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, bringing with them high-caliber weapons and new levels of aggression.
Entire villages have been displaced and more than a thousand people have been forcibly disappeared in the past nine months. The conflict has become so intense that earlier this year about 500 people fled across the border to seek safety in Guatemala, reversing a historic migration flow north.
“When we talk to people from other states, they say, ‘You are experiencing what we experienced 20 years ago,’” said Jose Luis Vizares, pastor of the diocese’s Justice and Peace office. “We tried to prevent it, but it happened so quickly.”
Pérez, an experienced mediator, intervened in conflicts that the authorities avoided. Miguel Sánchez Diaz, former mayor of the municipality of Bochil, recalled the priest’s intervention after a murder in 2021. “The prosecutor’s office could not go in to recover the body. The father made his way into the community and gave that person a holy burial,” he said.
Pérez knew his work was making him enemies. In 2015 he applied for protection from the Swedish Fellowship of Reconciliation. The organization documented near-constant threats: men on motorcycles followed the priest; The brakes and tires of his car were tampered with.
At the same time, he was prosecuted by government agencies seeking to discredit his work. Prosecutors accused him of close ties to an indigenous self-defense militia accused of forcibly disappearing 21 people during a conflict with an organized crime faction. A warrant for his arrest was issued but never executed.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has ordered the Mexican government to protect the priest. Police cars were watching his house and he had a panic button with him. However, the measures were not sufficient. As he was about to drive away after Mass on Sunday, a man walked up to his car window and shot him.
The federal government announced the deployment of 200 additional troops to Chiapas, and a suspect in the killing was arrested on Tuesday. But few expect an end to the violence.
After the funeral, the crowd crowded the cemetery to say their final goodbyes. They cried and threw confetti and petals on the coffin. A brass band played a march, the mourners waved incense, and as the coffin was lowered into the earth they shouted, “Father Marcelo lives!”
“The Mexican state wanted to kill him, but he is a seed,” Sánchez Luna said. “Today we plant the body of Father Marcelo, and thousands will grow.”
