Mexico at the crossroads

The fate of  was all too inevitable. Immediately after the priest went missing from his home in the state of Coahuila on January 3, authorities of his Diocese of Saltillo issued appeals for the security forces to do all in finding him and for his captors to release him unharmed.

But this is Mexico.

Thus, the terrible news came on January 13 that among three bodies found in Coahuila the previous day, one was Fr Sifuentes.

And so, Fr Sifuentes became the first Catholic cleric to perish by violence in Mexico in 2017. It is safe to describe him as ‘the first’ as the Latin American nation will no doubt build on the priestly body-count that made 2016 the worst on record in those terms and saw Mexico become joint first with Brazil for clerical murders – three each last year (and four catechists in the case of Mexico).

Murders

Most commentators look at murders in Mexico from the commencement of then President Felipe Calderón’s declaration of the War on Drugs in December 2006, a major inauguration announcement on his part that saw rates of violent crime in the country skyrocket as the cartels struck back at the interference in their trade. From that date to the grim discovery on January 12, no fewer than 32 priests have been kidnapped from their parishes and murdered.

Shocking as the killings are in isolation from the rest, they also serve as a symptom of a graver malaise in Mexico that threatens the stability of the state in 2017.

“We live in a wrecked environment, in a shattered society,” Bishop José Raúl Vera López of Saltillio lamented when news of Fr Sifuentes’ death filtered out, and in this, the prelate was accurately summing up his country’s present state of affairs.

Even leaving aside the issue of drugs for a moment, Mexico today faces a raft of threats to its wellbeing.

Most recently, the country has been struck by outbreaks of violence amid protests at rising fuel prices – petrol jumped by 20% on January 1– which are now having a knock-on effect in other areas of Mexican life, from upwardly creeping fares for public transport to food prices.

Having previously sold moves to deregulate the petrol sector as good for consumers, national ire has not unexpectedly turned on President Enrique Peña Nieto. Media observers of the petrol protests reported that some Mexicans now rate their president as worse for their country than his counterpart, President Donald Trump.

On events north of the border, the incoming Trump administration is also piling on the pressure for Mexicans. Ignoring pre-election bluster of the ‘Great Wall’, President Trump has already prompted a major rethink by US firms which normally opt for the lower costs of manufacturing their goods in Mexico, the latest being car giant GM Ford which cancelled plans for a Mexican plant in favour of pleasing the US president with jobs creation in the state of Michigan. Fiat Chrysler has signalled that it may follow suit. The Mexican peso, meanwhile, already under pressure slumped even further before the Trump inauguration when his nominee for Commerce Secretary announced that, once installed, he will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The outcome to all of this is as sadly predictable as the fate of Fr Sifuentes. Facing increased poverty, the loss of hoped-for jobs and spiraling costs, how long before an unknowable number of Mexicans decide that the drugs cartels offer their best prospects for the immediate future?

It is into this breach that Mexico’s Catholic Church has always stepped. Through education, provision for the poor, and any number of programmes designed to offer alternatives to young and despairing Mexicans, it is the Church which defies the inevitable. And it is its priests who pay the ultimate price when the Church’s message becomes inconvenient to drug dealers and those corrupted by their bribes.

Priests like Fr Sifuentes, murdered for preaching the hope that there can be a better path for Mexico, despite the challenges ahead.