This is how Father Marcelo was killed in Chiapas: “He was telling me that he was coming when I heard the shots… He shouted, ‘Ay, ay.’ Then all I could hear was the radio.”
EL PAÍS relates the priest’s life in the Highlands region. Testimonies from people very close to him blame the political group that held power in Pantelhó for his murder.

Altar placed in memory of the priest Marcelo Pérez, in the parish of Guadalupe, in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. Nayeli Cruz
It was raining that morning in San Cristóbal de las Casas. It was Sunday, October 20th. The lashings of rain from the last hurricane of the season were felt in the Chiapas Highlands, cooling the atmosphere, slowing everything down. In the parish of the Cuxtitali neighborhood, Father Marcelo Pérez was finishing the first mass of the day a little late, before leaving for the Guadalupe church, his main center. It was a few minutes before 8:00 when he got into his truck. While he was doing so, he called his assistant on the phone. “He told me ‘I’m leaving now.’ He was going to come get me to go to the church,” she says, “but then I heard the shots, and a scream of fear, and then, an ‘ay, ay.’ I said, ‘alright? Alright?’ But then all I could hear was the radio.”
These were the last moments of the priest’s life, one of the most important voices of the Catholic Church in southern Mexico, also one of the most caustic and uncomfortable, a tireless warrior against crime. “I ran out with my dad in a taxi, I still had hope that he was okay,” continues the assistant, whose name is not appearing for security reasons. “When I got there, I opened the passenger door. I looked for his panic button, I grabbed it and pressed it so that help would arrive. He was there, covered in blood, with his head tilted,” she says. Minutes later, Marcelo Pérez bled to death in the car, to the horror of the parishioners, who slowly left the parish church, approaching the truck.

A Tsotsil family observes the tomb of the indigenous priest. Nayeli Cruz
Sadness and anger filled the first hours, the first days, after the attack. There was no room for much more. Hundreds of people arrived on Sunday morning at the Guadalupe parish, the second most important in the city, which is easily seen on top of a hill, from the streets of the tourist center, always so far removed from its surroundings, detached from the problems of the Highlands. Women carried their candles wrapped in paper, as well as flowers. Father Marcelo’s body, taken to the headquarters of the Attorney General’s Office, would return hours later to his church, uniting for a moment both worlds, the picturesque fantasy of the center and the brutality prevailing in the region, his body passing between bars and souvenir shops.
But as the days passed, and despite the arrest of the alleged murderer, the dismay gave way to anger. For 23 years, first in Chenalhó, then in Simojovel and now from San Cristóbal, the 51-year-old priest had denounced injustice. And he had done so by giving names and surnames, criticising the mafia clans of the Highlands and the northern zone. He had done so in Chenalhó, alongside the survivors of the Acteal massacre, the savage attack against a group of Tsotsil indigenous people in 1997, which had left 45 dead, most of them women and children. He had also done so in Simojovel, from where he received his first death threats ten years ago. But, in recent times, he had dedicated himself body and soul to Pantelhó.
It is a word, Pantelhó, that has appeared recurrently these days in interviews with different people in Father Marcelo’s entourage in Chiapas. From San Cristóbal to Simojovel, passing through San Andrés Larráinzar and nearby communities, the conflict that the municipality has been experiencing for more than 20 years, which has worsened since 2021 and has left dozens dead, appears as the background for the attack against the priest. In some cases, the signs are very clear. A seminary colleague of the priest, with whom he has maintained a relationship all these years, says, without a doubt: “Father Marcelo’s death is due to the Pantelhó case.”

Tsotsil indigenous people attend a mass at the church of San Andrés Larráinzar, the town where Father Marcelo Pérez was born. Nayeli Cruz
The name of the colleague and those of others do not appear in these lines. In some cases, their positions do not appear either. Within the universe of conflicts in Chiapas, those in the Highlands and the northern zone are especially delicate. They are old problems, anchored in territorial disputes, cacique despotism and fights over budgets, with known protagonists, exacerbated in recent years by the heat of the powerful weaponry that floods the region. All the people in his environment consulted, eight in total, describe Father Marcelo as an exceptional mediator. And they all mention, also, that the priest took sides for what he believed was right, without leaving honesty aside.
El Machete
Pantelhó hangs in the clouds in the Chiapas Highlands, a cold, mountainous region, so well portrayed in Rosario Castellanos’s prodigious novel, Oficio de Tinieblas. The author shows the racism against the indigenous population, mostly Tsotsil, still in the 20th century, as well as the abandonment. Dozens of hamlets populate the slopes and hillsides, still reflecting the isolation of the people. Many towns are only reached by paths and dirt roads. As occurs in Oaxaca or Guerrero, local leaders have become strong in the towns, drinking from the municipal budget, something that occurred in Pantelhó. Only there, the population revolted.
Father Víctor Manuel Pérez, parish priest of the municipality, explains that, for more than 20 years, a group of “hitmen and drug traffickers” had controlled the City Hall, the Herrera clan. “Since 2003 or 2004, people from the communities have counted more than 200 deaths,” he explains, people who confronted them. In 2021, residents appeared in a video wearing balaclavas and T-shirts. They represented, they said, the majority of the 86 communities of Pantelhó and called themselves El Machete, a cry against injustice, in the path of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, 27 years after its uprising.

A banner was placed in the church where parish priest Marcelo Pérez officiated mass for several years, in Simojovel, Chiapas. Nayeli Cruz
“But they made a serious mistake,” says the priest, who has been leading the parish of the municipality for a year and a half. “It was when they disappeared the 19,” he adds. On July 26th, 2021, El Machete detained and disappeared 21 people. Only two were found, the rest were never heard from. Pérez points out that some of those 19 were “innocent” and that others were part of the Los Herrera clan, led by the father, Austreberto, arrested, accused of homicide, and his two sons, Rubén Estanislao and Dayli de los Santos. From his parish in Simojovel, in northern Chiapas, Father Marcelo Pérez, who supported the rebels, tried to mediate. He tried to convince El Machete to release them.
But he did not succeed. In newspaper reports from those days, the priest appears accompanied by residents of Pantelhó and members of El Machete. In a videotaped interview, reporters ask him about the 19, but the priest, serious and frustrated, answers, looking to his left: “I don’t know, they know.” Nothing more. A person who accompanied him during his years as parish priest in Simojovel, where he was from 2011 to October 2021, remembers those days. “It affected him a lot not being able to do anything for those boys. He couldn’t sleep. Because he had gone there to get them released, but they told him no, because they were already dead,” he says.
Father Víctor Manuel, who had known Marcelo Pérez for decades, remembers that the disappearance of those men, which barely made the news in the national press, fueled the battle between El Machete and Los Herrera, in the streets and in the offices, to seize municipal power. State authorities took action and, a year later, arrested one of the community leaders who had supported El Machete, accused of the disappearance of the 19. The church also reported that the Attorney General’s Office was targeting Father Marcelo for the same case. As if the priest, a supporter of the cause defended by the self-defense forces, was, in fact, one of their leaders, responsible for the disappearance.

Members of the Mexican army advance through the town of Yabteclum, in Chenalhó, Chiapas. Nayeli Cruz
The last months of 2021 would mark the reality of the following months, in Pantelhó and in the Highlands region. The uprising of El Machete, the burning of houses that supposedly belonged to Los Herrera, the disappearance of the 19, began a cycle of violence and confusion that continued with the murder, in August, in San Cristóbal, of the state prosecutor for indigenous justice, Gregorio Pérez, in charge, among other things, of investigating the Los Herrera clan. In April of this year, a judge convicted one of the Herrera brothers, Dayli de Los Santos, of being the mastermind behind the murder.
Deep in mediation of the conflict in Pantelhó, the diocese of San Cristóbal moved the parish priest in October 2021, from Simojovel to the Guadalupe church in the city. It was an organic decision, after ten years in the North zone, but also a way to protect him. After all, he might be safer in San Cristóbal than in Simojovel, where he had been receiving threats for years for the criticism he repeatedly made of the local mafia. The person who accompanied him during his years as parish priest in Simojovel says that “the Gómez,” the local mafia, who held power in the town hall, “had threatened to burn the priest in his parish church, with everything and the people inside.”
The Cross
“When he arrived here, people did not like Father Marcelo. They said he was a murderer,” recalls his assistant from his years at the Guadalupe church. “In fact, he said he was afraid,” adds his mother, standing next to her in her house. The mother also supported the priest. “When he arrived, he walked up to the church, with his Jesus on the cross. He thought they were going to stone him. Later, he said jokingly that, when he went up, he said to Jesus, ‘Well, if they throw stones, you are going to be first.’ He was like that,” concludes the mother.
As the months and years went by, Father Marcelo won the hearts of the people of San Cristóbal, of the parishioners of the main church, Guadalupe, but also of the secondary ones, such as Cuxtitali. The neighbors of Simojovel continued to visit him, also from Chenalhó and Pantelhó. The priest received everyone, he never said no. A neighbor from Acteal, in Chenalhó, 15 minutes from Pantelhó, recalled this week that, once, she and her husband traveled to San Cristóbal for her son’s birthday. They went to eat pizza. Since they were alone, they called the priest to see if he wanted to accompany them. And he came down from the church and spent the afternoon with them.

View of the community of Acteal, Chiapas, on October 24, 2024. Nayeli Cruz
“In recent times, his main concern was Pantelhó,” his assistant in Guadalupe continues. “They sent him photos of mangled bodies in bags. He always mentioned the problem at mass. He said that there were bad people in charge of the government there,” she says. In recent times, the priest did not tell her if he had received any threats, at least new threats. In 2016, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had asked the Mexican State to protect his life. But he did not want bodyguards. “He said he already had four: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit and the Virgin,” says his assistant.
After almost three years of conflict, the residents of Pantelhó were called to the polls last June. But the murders and clashes in the municipality forced the authorities to suspend the vote. They tried again in August, but failed again. In all of Chiapas, Pantelhó was the only municipality that did not vote, and one of the few in all of Mexico. At the end of September, the local Congress finally appointed a new municipal council made up of members of the Herrera clan. But for El Machete and the population that supports them, this was an affront that brought them back to square one.
In mid-October, El Machete and its support bases prevented the new council from taking office. Meanwhile, they were preparing a challenge before the Congress of Chiapas. A person who knows in detail what happened those days explains that Father Marcelo Pérez was attentive, in detail, to the entire process. “He accompanied the compañeros from the communities to the hearings with the Government, with Congress and so on. He facilitated those meetings,” he explains.
On Tuesday They’ll Shoot Me
There are two songs that appear constantly in the sketches that friends and acquaintances make of Father Marcelo in his final months. Two songs that the priest listened to, perhaps to give himself courage, to ward off horror, anguish. One was Venceremos, by Jairo, a song of hope from the years after the Argentine dictatorship, in the 1980s. Jairo sang: “Only with justice will we become masters of peace. I want my country to be happy.”
The other was El martes me fusilan (On Tuesday They’ll Shoot Me) , a corrido by Vicente Fernández, which evoked the old years of the Cristero Wars, in the first half of the 20th century, when the Mexican State persecuted Catholics and they took up arms to protect themselves. “They will kill my useless body, but never, never my soul. I tell my executioners that I want them to crucify me. And once crucified, then let them use their rifles,” Fernández sings.

Guadalupe Vázquez, survivor of the Acteal massacre and friend of the priest Marcelo Pérez. Nayeli Cruz.
Father Marcelo Pérez spoke frequently about death. It was not something new. During his years in Chenalhó, he fell in love with the figure of Alonso Vázquez, leader of Las Abejas, an organization that has fought since the early 1990s against the model of progress imposed by the State. In 1997, Vázquez was murdered, allegedly by paramilitaries who supported the Government, one of the 45 victims of the Acteal massacre. “Marcelo said he wanted to be like him,” says Guadalupe, the daughter of Alonso Vázquez, a survivor of the massacre. “My father said that if he knew that by giving up his life he would save his children and the people, he would give it up.”
It was a discourse about death, but also about sacrifice, about dying as Christ did, for his children, for all of humanity, to save it. It is no secret that Father Marcelo’s great idol was Monsignor Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop, apostle of peace and justice, who was assassinated while giving mass in March 1980. “He said, ‘How I would like to die like this, in mass, like Romero,’” says the person who collaborated with him during the Simojovel years.
Since the local Congress appointed the new Pantelhó government, a definitive nervousness took hold of Father Marcelo. Just then, at the beginning of October, one of his former collaborators received a call from him. “He told me that they were going to kill him. He was crying,” she says. His assistant in Guadalupe says: “He seemed strong, but I think he was scared inside. Sometimes I saw him listening to that song about on Tuesday they will shoot me and I would walk away. He would tell me ‘listen to it,’ but I would tell him no, that the lyrics are ugly.”

Crosses placed in memory of the victims of the Acteal massacre. Nayeli Cruz
The night before he was killed, the priest had a vegetable soup for dinner at a restaurant in San Cristóbal. Then he went home to the parish and was left alone, with his thoughts, his songs, his Monsignor Romero t-shirts, his anguish, all the pain accumulated over 23 years of practice. “He told me he was going to pray and then go to sleep,” says his assistant. The person who supported him during his years in Simojovel spoke to him on the phone: “I felt a certain sadness… My daughter spoke to him and felt it too.”
Sunday dawned with rain in San Cristóbal. For certain, Father Marcelo got up at about 5:30, a habit acquired during his years in the seminary. For certain, he prayed for a while, as he did every day, still in the dark, with the sound of the falling drops in the background. He left home, got into his white truck, went to Cuxtitali, said mass, left the church… “When I heard that they had killed him as he left there, I said, ‘It was almost his fate, Father,’” the person from Simojovel remembers. “He almost died like Monsignor Romero.”

Residents attend a mass for the death of the indigenous priest. Nayeli Cruz
Original article by Pablo Ferri, El País, October 27th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.
All photos by Nayeli Cruz.