Citing a “profound crisis of violence and social disintegration,” Mexico’s Catholic bishops are staking out an aggressive new role in national security, going so far as to sit down with feuding drug traffickers in one blood-soaked state to hammer out a truce.
The church is also pressing for a change in the anti-crime strategy pursued by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Church leaders recently persuaded the candidates in the July 2 presidential election to sign a “National Commitment for Peace” that includes a lengthy list of proposed reforms, such as strengthening local police forces and making the justice system more professional and transparent.
Together, the initiatives amount to a new level of activism for a church that has largely stayed outside the political fray. Mexico is the world’s second-most-populous Catholic country, after Brazil. But its priests have historically been constrained by the anticlerical policies that took root during the 19th-century war of independence from Spain. Until the 1990s, it was illegal for priests even to wear their vestments in public.
The church is acting now, Bishop Ramón Castro says, because it has received a torrent of complaints from parishioners who have suffered extortion, robbery and the disappearance of loved ones.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Church leaders recently persuaded the candidates in the July 2 presidential election to sign a “National Commitment for Peace” that includes a lengthy list of proposed reforms, such as strengthening local police forces and making the justice system more professional and transparent.
While he has continued to rely on the army to fight drug traffickers, he has also promoted social programs aimed at deterring young people from joining criminal groups.
Criminal organizations that once focused on trafficking marijuana, cocaine and heroin have diversified into synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, as well as other illicit businesses, including gasoline theft and migrant smuggling.
In hyperviolent states such as Guerrero in the south, heavily armed criminal groups control wide swaths of countryside and extort city dwellers ranging from bus drivers to taco vendors.
The Mexican bishops, the Jesuit order and other Catholic leaders subsequently launched a “National Dialogue for Peace,” bringing together more than 20,000 people in forums to fashion a new security strategy.
Felipe Gaytán, a sociologist at La Salle University in Mexico City who has written extensively about religion, says the document reflects a new, proactive stance by church leaders, who have remained influential even as the number of faithful in the pews has fallen off.
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