Just before 8:00 a.m. on Sunday, October 20th, 2024, parishioners were leaving the Catholic church in Cuxtitali, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in the Chiapas Highlands, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state. Mass had just ended, and parishioners opened their umbrellas and wrapped themselves in shawls as they stepped out into the cold morning rain. Across the plaza, the parish’s fifty-year-old Jesuit priest, Marcelo Pérez, hurried toward his white Ford, parked on an adjacent street.
Once in the car, Father Marcelo called a parish assistant who lived nearby with his family to let her know he was heading to another church and would pick her up on the way. While they were talking on the phone, she heard the crack of a gunshot, a scream, and then a resigned cry of “Oh, oh.”
Surveillance camera footage shows the Ford moving slowly down the street before gently colliding with a parked car. The assistant, who asked me not to reveal her name, remembers grabbing her father and getting into a taxi. Within five minutes, they arrived at Father Marcelo’s car. He was surrounded by about 20 parishioners, but there were no police. They told her the shooter was wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap, but they couldn’t see his face. He was on foot, with an accomplice on a motorcycle waiting to give him a ride. There were bullet holes in the driver’s window, and inside, Father Marcelo was dead.
For more than two decades, Father Marcelo had fought for the rights of the poor indigenous people of Chiapas. Up to 40% of the state’s population is indigenous (predominantly Maya), and Father Marcelo was a Tsotsil native, direct descendants of the Maya people who inhabited the region before the Spanish conquest. Chiapas is an extremely impoverished region; one-third of its population works on small plots of corn and beans, a traditional form of agriculture that holds spiritual significance for the Maya but has not provided a sufficient livelihood for decades. For years, indigenous farmers supplemented their income with seasonal migration to sugar plantations, coffee farms, and cattle ranches, but many of these farms have closed. Now, two-thirds of Chiapas’ inhabitants live in poverty, almost half in extreme poverty. The average daily wage for an indigenous person in the state is equivalent to less than five dollars.
Murder is widespread throughout Mexico, largely due to drug cartels that have infiltrated every aspect of life. According to Amnesty International, more than 450,000 people have been murdered in the country since 2007, with more than 100,000 disappearances. In Chiapas, violence has skyrocketed since 2021, when gunmen from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) murdered El Junior, the son of the local leader of the Sinaloa cartel. In the ten months leading up to Father Marcelo’s death, disappearances and displacements increased, and the homicide rate increased by more than 60% compared to the previous year. Given this escalation, it is not surprising that more than 500,000 residents of Chiapas—9% of the population—have emigrated to the United States.
Lately, the Jalisco cartel has attempted to take over the lucrative Sinaloa trade on the Chiapas-Guatemala border, fighting back with rocket-propelled grenades, drones, and armored trucks known as “narco-tanks.” Entire towns have been abandoned for weeks: last July, nearly 600 residents of Amatenango de la Frontera fled to Guatemala. And cartel infiltration appears to have made the Mexican army increasingly nervous and violent. In October, after a smuggling truck refused to obey orders from an army platoon, soldiers opened fire and killed or maimed 16 people. Most were desperate migrants from Egypt, Nepal, Pakistan, and Cuba.
A special prosecutor for the Attorney General’s Office speculated that there isn’t a single municipality in Chiapas that isn’t dominated by cartels; indeed, their infiltration is so extensive it has become impossible to measure. In Chiapas, the two centers of resistance are the Zapatistas—the revolutionary insurgents who maintain their own health and education systems and aspire to agricultural self-sufficiency—and the Maya people known as the Pueblo Creyente (Believing People). Marcelo was a vocal leader in the community; his murder has dealt a severe blow to their ability to challenge the cartels.
The Pueblo Creyente (Believing People) is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, which has a history of social activism dating back to 1960, when Samuel Ruiz García became bishop. Ruiz began his tenure as a conservative, but as liberation theology swept through the Latin American Church in the 1960s, he adopted a “preferential option for the poor” and focused his ministry on the impoverished Maya people of his diocese. Ruiz learned four Maya languages. He fought against racist practices, such as prohibiting indigenous people from walking on sidewalks during the day or anywhere in the city at night, and gradually incorporated a number of Indigenous practices into local masses, which the Vatican finally approved in 2024.
Ruiz retired in 2000. No one in Chiapas embraced his legacy more powerfully than Father Marcelo. Like Ruiz, he had an innate talent for mediation. Over the decades, he became a key activist defending Indigenous rights in the region. Marcelo’s influence was even more profound because he was the first native Tsotsil-speaking priest in a region plagued by racism against indigenous peoples.
Due to his courageous stances, Father Marcelo was in constant conflict with the authorities. He was well known for his distrust of the police. He knew he was not safe from violence: he was beaten in the street, had his car tires loosened, and once had a jumper cable connected to his gas tank. At the time of his death, there was a million-peso bounty on his head. Despite all this, for more than a decade, since his appointment in 2011 as parish priest of the Chiapas town of Simojovel, he led peace marches that seemed to grow steadily. In September 2024, he led a march of 30,000 people to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital, during which he urged Mexico’s newly elected president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and the incoming governor of Chiapas, Eduardo Ramírez Aguilar, to take the state’s problems seriously. Otherwise, he said, “it could explode.”
In the last three decades, 80 priests have been murdered in Mexico, more than anywhere else in the world. Father Marcelo was not the most famous priest in the country, but his reputation as a fearless opponent of the wave of lawlessness sweeping Chiapas was unmatched. Following his assassination, attacks against Church personnel and human rights activists increased. There is widespread fear that, in Father Marcelo’s absence, the cartels are better positioned than ever to dominate local governments and inflict violence on the people of Chiapas.
North of San Cristóbal lies the Highlands region, with jagged, rolling mountains covered in cornfields and small forests that slope north and east toward the rainforest, the coastal plain of Tabasco, and the Gulf. Father Marcelo was born in Highlands in 1974, in the small town of Chichelalhó. He was a shy child with a pronounced stutter who grew up working the land on his parents’ corn and bean farm.
“He knew what it was like to be looked down on,” an anthropologist who knew him told me. Janet Schwartz, an American art historian who opened a clothing store in San Cristóbal in the early 1980s, remembers young Marcelo and his mother coming in with scraps of fabric to sell. “He was barefoot,” Schwartz recalls, “and terribly shy.”
At the age of fifteen, he went to the seminary, where, according to a fellow priest, he first learned not only Spanish but also “the categories of Western thought.” In 2002, shortly after finishing seminary, Father Marcelo was appointed parish priest of Chenalhó, a Tsotsil-speaking municipality near Chichelalhó. It was an important position because, among other reasons, Chenalhó had been the scene of one of the decisive events following the Zapatista uprising of January 1994.
This twelve-day uprising took Mexico by surprise. It began the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, an agreement the Zapatistas correctly predicted would cripple the local corn-based economy. Because the uprising was carried out largely by and for the indigenous population of Chiapas, the poorest of the poor, it enjoyed enormous popularity among the Mexican population. But the Mexican security forces proved deeply hostile. Later that same year, even as the government and the Zapatistas were publicly negotiating a peace agreement, the army, with the government’s knowledge, instituted a secret program, Plan Chiapas, to train and equip paramilitary squads to unleash violence not only against the Zapatistas, but against any religious community that supported their progressive ideals.
On December 22nd, 1997, in the village of Acteal, Chenalhó, a group of Catholic religious communities belonging to a pacifist civil society organization known as Las Abejas (The Bees) became embroiled in violence by one of these secretly government-funded paramilitary groups. Las Abejas had taken refuge in and around a small chapel, close enough to the violence to hear gunshots and see smoke rising from nearby villages. They believed that since they were religious and had done nothing wrong, God would protect them. But when the paramilitaries, led by a group known as Red Mask, arrived at the chapel, they went on a frenzied killing spree, executing 45 Abejas, mostly women and children. (The death toll is sometimes counted as 49, including four fetuses ripped from their mothers’ wombs with machetes.)
The Mexican government initially tried to dismiss the massacre as “intercommunal violence,” but the gruesome details, including the army’s attempt to destroy evidence the next morning, sparked international outrage. Low-ranking members of Red Mask were eventually sent to prison, but several were released in 2009 after serving relatively short sentences. It took the government 23 years to admit its own involvement. When it finally did, at a press conference held by the Ministry of the Interior in 2020, the government offered the Abejas reparations, including new roads, scholarships, and improvements to electrical and water infrastructure. Some rejected them, arguing that the government had refused to prosecute the masterminds of the massacre. Former President Zedillo Ponce de León, allegedly one of the main drivers of the clandestine counterinsurgency, was top of the list.
However, the regular attacks against Indigenous communities continued for so long that, eventually, the children of members of Máscara Roja and other paramilitary squads became what are known as neo-paramilitaries. These armed men do not work for the government, but for the cartels. In 2020, Simón Pedro Pérez López, a highly respected member of Las Abejas’ board of directors, told a reporter: “We see with our own eyes that the children of those who killed our families are now joining the ranks of new paramilitary groups and harassing indigenous communities.”
Father Marcelo studied at the Santa María de Guadalupe Seminary in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, an institution with a reputation for theological conservatism. But when he arrived in Chenalhó, the history of violence in Acteal immediately impacted him. “Acteal enlightened me,” he told a Uruguayan journalist in 2022: “I was afraid, but I saw that the people of Acteal were free.”
Indigenous activist Guadalupe Vázquez Luna emphasized how significant it was for the locals to hear Mass celebrated by a native Tsotsil speaker for the first time. “It’s not the same when people translate,” she told me. “It was beautiful, it was very important.” Vázquez Luna had survived the Acteal massacre. Her father, a catechist, was shot in the head. Her mother was also killed; as Vázquez Luna lay beside her outside the chapel, she felt the bullet enter her mother’s body.
However, despite the importance of his leadership in Chenalhó, Father Marcelo faced a serious problem. Despite the notoriety of the Acteal massacre, the government continued its program of low-intensity warfare against the Zapatistas and the communities of the faithful. By 2002, thousands of local people had been evicted from their lands, many forced to flee into the mountains. Some resorted to plastic sheeting for shelter. Many suffered from malnutrition. As Father Marcelo worked to organize aid for the displaced, he began receiving threats.
At first, Father Marcelo was reluctant to challenge authority, but, as José Alfredo Jiménez Pérez, a Tsotsil member of Las Abejas, told me, the organization’s tradition of nonviolent activism transformed him. “He denounced alcohol and drug abuse,” said a journalist who knew him well. “He regularly denounced drug traffickers, more directly than the bishops.” In the words of Luz Rodríguez, a parish assistant in Chenalhó, he went from being a “rabbit” to a “lion.” Retaliation was swift. After campaigning against a government plan that would have forcibly resettled displaced indigenous people in a new model village, the parish house was burned. Later, two men beat him in the street.
In 2011, fearing for Father Marcelo’s life, the Diocese of San Cristóbal transferred him to Simojovel, about 50 kilometers north, an amber mining center controlled by the Gómez Domínguez family. Like many dominant families throughout Chiapas’ history, they are mestizo, meaning not indigenous. In Simojovel, he quickly resumed his activism and helped form the environmental and human rights organization Movement in Defense of Life and Territory. “The authorities have our demands in their hands,” the group told Ángeles Mariscal of the online outlet Chiapas Paralelo.
‘’No more murders, no more prostitution, no more drug trafficking, no more drug-related politicians, no more arms trafficking, no more human trafficking. We demand clean water, a decent hospital for our sick, and better road conditions.’’
He began leading protest marches. Two thousand people participated in the first, in March 2014, and four thousand in the second, in June of that same year. By October, the ranks of protesters had grown to 15,000.
According to the press, it was the Gómez Domínguez family that put a price of one million pesos on Father Marcelo’s head. They also threatened to “do like they did in Acteal,” that is, burn Father Marcelo’s church in Simojovel and everyone inside. Meanwhile, Marcelo kept the state government informed of his activities. At one point, he was offered an bulletproof car.
And then there was the situation in Pantelhó, a paradigmatic example of the cartels’ municipal dominance in the region. Pantelhó had long been controlled by another mestizo family, known as Los Herrera. According to Luis Hernández Navarro, opinion editor of the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada, Los Herrera’s businesses include “drug, migrant, and arms trafficking, as well as car theft.” A person connected with law enforcement in Chiapas told me that Los Herrera were allied with the Jalisco cartel, although these links are difficult to confirm.
What is clear about the Herreras is that they are extraordinarily violent. They reportedly recruited professional gunmen from Campeche, Veracruz, and Sinaloa. The Mexican magazine Proceso described the family patriarch, Austreberto Herrera, as a man who “solved everything with gunfire.” He is currently in prison for murdering two relatives who mocked his son, Daylí Herrera de los Santos, for his harelip. Daylí himself is in prison on suspicion of ordering the murder of Chiapas prosecutor Gregorio Pérez Gómez, who had been appointed to investigate the violence in Pantelhó; Pérez Gómez was shot dead by hitmen riding motorcycles on the streets of San Cristóbal in August 2021. According to the Diocese of San Cristóbal, some 200 townspeople have been killed during the Herreras’ 20-year reign of terror.
The majority of Pantelhó’s residents are poor Indigenous people, many of them affiliated with Las Abejas or the Zapatistas. The entire town’s population lives below the poverty line, and more than half live in extreme poverty. It is largely the poor Indigenous people who have been victims of Herrera’s violence.
In June 2021, a group of Pantelhó residents petitioned state authorities to take action and asked Simón Pedro Pérez López, a member of Las Abejas’ board of directors, for help. Pérez López drafted a letter documenting a series of recent murders in Pantelhó and discreetly delivered it to Chiapas state authorities. However, the news leaked, and hitmen found Pérez López in the Simojovel market with his young son. They executed Pérez López with a shot to the head.
That murder may have been a step too far for the Herreras. For the region’s poor indigenous people, and for the religious community in particular, Pérez López was an important moral leader. In early July, two days after Pérez López’s murder, dozens of heavily armed and hooded men occupied the center of Pantelhó. They identified themselves as El Machete, a self-defense organization representing the villages of Pantelhó. In a statement to the press, they said they would no longer tolerate drug traffickers, hitmen, or narco-politicians. They wanted an end to land invasions, confiscations of communal property, impunity for criminals, and the repression of Indigenous people.
Three weeks later, El Machete returned to Pantelhó to arrest 21 people they accused of being Herrera’s hitmen, including five members of the Herrera family. They burned their houses, handcuffed the accused to a kiosk in the middle of the town square, and explained that since the Chiapas authorities had refused to protect the residents of Pantelhó, they would do it themselves. El Machete loaded the captives into pickup trucks and took them to the nearby village of San José Buenavista Tercero, where they underwent public interrogation. Three people in the group were declared innocent or released. The other eighteen, including the five Herreras, disappeared.
When, following the disappearances, El Machete appeared before the press, Father Marcelo appeared with them. He had always advocated nonviolent solutions, and for many spectators, his presence signified his desire to mediate the region’s differences. At one point, a journalist asked a spokesperson for El Machete about the disappeared, and Father Marcelo became visibly distressed. Those images were enough for the Herreras to convince the Chiapas Attorney General’s Office to issue an arrest warrant for Father Marcelo. But the Attorney General’s Office never executed the warrant, possibly because it was aware of Father Marcelo’s advocacy of nonviolence, or perhaps because he had not been present during the interrogation.
Immediately after the disappearances, the Herreras formed their own self-defense unit, called the Indigenous Civil Army, and counterattacked, leaving the center of Pantelhó a ghost town, with municipal buildings riddled with bullet holes. Since then, the violence has spread to neighboring Chenalhó. Dozens of people have been killed and another 3,400 have been displaced.
In June 2024, due to this upsurge in violence, the Mexican government postponed the municipal elections in Pantelhó. It did so again in August. But on September 30th, in the final hours before the expiration of all Chiapas legislators’ terms, a small group of representatives unilaterally appointed a list of candidates from the Herreras to lead a provisional government for Pantelhó. That decision has been challenged in federal court, and new elections have been called. But the interim government came to power just in time to seize control of the 18 million peso budget in early October.
Three years earlier, concerned for Marcelo’s safety, the diocese had transferred him back to San Cristóbal. He was appointed parish priest of Guadalupe, which includes the Cuxtitali church, and became responsible for social ministry for the San Cristóbal diocese. The size of his demonstrations continued to grow, culminating in the peace march of 30,000 people in September, which for the first time included the other two dioceses of Chiapas.
Despite his successes in San Cristóbal and the rapid growth of his movement, Father Marcelo remained haunted by all indications by his failure to stem the escalating violence in and around Pantelhó. After the elections in late September, the incoming governor briefly used Father Marcelo as a mediator and, according to security sources, abruptly removed him. After years of threats against his life, in 2016 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (a branch of the Organization of American States) ordered member state Mexico to provide him with security, but he put his principles before his life and refused bodyguards. “It goes against the Gospel for someone to die so that I may live,” he told a reporter. He was assassinated shortly after.
Within days, Chiapas authorities arrested the alleged murderer, a small-time drug trafficker known as El Kalimba, or The Crystal King. He was held in El Amate, a maximum-security prison in Chiapas. But in late November, a Chiapas radio reporter reported that El Kalimba and a car full of his family members had been kidnapped by unknown assailants while driving outside the prison. Authorities offered no explanation.
El Kalimba was arrested again by the San Cristóbal municipal police in March. After Father Marcelo’s murder, President Sheinbaum promised a federal investigation without impunity. (According to the think tank México Evalúa, more than 93% of crimes investigated in Mexico go unpunished.) However, after nine months, the case appears to have stalled, and impunity is likely to continue to reign.
Father Marcelo’s death shows the people of Chiapas how close they are to the political abyss. Before Donald Trump’s reelection, the usual price for being smuggled into the United States was $15,000, an immigration expert at a Mexican university told me. For an indigenous person, raising that kind of money not only entails borrowing from relatives, but also taking out loans with usurious interest rates and putting up land, houses, cars, and anything else as collateral. Those who manage to reach the United States can send back unimaginable sums of money to their families. Last year, nearly $1 billion arrived in San Cristóbal from the United States, making it the Mexican city with the most remittances.
Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants to Mexico is deeply destabilizing. By the end of April, more than 3,500 people had already been abandoned at a Tapachula airport by planes operated by GlobalX Airlines, the same mysterious charter service that flew Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador in March, even after a judge issued an injunction against the deportations. If thousands more migrants are forced to return to Chiapas, Gabriela Coutiño, Proceso’s correspondent in Chiapas, told me, it would be catastrophic. “Most communities in Chiapas barely have basic services for the current population, much less jobs or job security,” she said.
“If, in addition, the migrants who enter Mexico from the south, across the border with Guatemala, were no longer just passing through, but were forced to stay, it would create a perfect storm… They would have to join the cartels to survive.”
For decades, Father Marcelo was perhaps the most outspoken political dissident in one of Mexico’s most conflict-ridden regions. When pushing for solutions, he could be defiant. Privately, however, he was fearful. According to journalist Pablo Ferri, in the weeks before his murder, he called his closest friends and cried. His assistant at the Church of Guadalupe told me he obsessively listened to a ballad titled “El martes me fusilan” (They’ll Shoot Me on Tuesday), about a Catholic murdered for his faith. “They’ll kill my useless body,” the song goes, “but never, never, my soul.”
Original article by Peter Canby, MIRA, July 27th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.