Pastor shot dead in southern Mexico after leaving Sunday service | Crime News

The public remembers Marcelo Perez as a passionate champion of Indigenous, labor rights in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

A priest known for fighting for indigenous and labor rights in Mexico has been killed after leaving a church service, local authorities said.

Catholic priest Marcelo Perez was returning home from church on Sunday when two men on a motorcycle shot him, prosecutors in the southern state of Chiapas said.

“Father Marcelo has been a symbol of resistance and has stood beside the communities of Chiapas for decades, defending dignity and human rights and working for true peace,” the Jesuits, Perez’s religious organization, said in a statement.

The killings come amid a period of intense violence in the southern province, where around 500 murders were recorded between January and August this year.

Along with the rights of indigenous people and farm workers, the Jesuits say Perez is also a vocal critic of organized crime groups.

“This region is not only suffering from killings, but also from forced recruitment (into criminal groups), kidnappings, threats and extortion of its natural resources,” the religious order said.

Mexican human rights activists and environmentalists have long denounced torture and intimidation by criminal gangs and government security forces.

Perez was also a member of the Tzotzil tribe and had served the community of Chiapas for twenty years, building a reputation as someone who could help resolve conflicts, especially on the land issue.

“We will cooperate with all the authorities so that his death goes unpunished and those responsible face the courts,” Chipas Governor Rutilio Escandon said on social media, calling his killing “cowardly”.

But in Mexico, accountability for murders is different from the law, with about 95 percent of all murders still unsolved.

Rights activists and indigenous land defenders face high levels of violence and intimidation in Mexico.

Amnesty International’s 2023 report found that those groups face high levels of criminality and persecution as part of a “wider strategy to undermine and dismantle their representation of land, space and nature”.

The rights group also said that Mexico “ranks among the countries with the highest number of killings of environmental defenders”.

On Sunday, the United Nations human rights office in Mexico said that “many national and international organizations have publicly warned about the increasing number of threats, attacks and criminal acts against” Perez, a priest.

It said those threats have “increased significantly in recent years due to his tireless work in favor of justice and the rights of Aboriginal people”.