Nine Shots Fired Against Faith: The Strange Case of the Priests Murdered in Veracruz

Two municipal police officers walk along the highway, performing a task that has become common in northern Veracruz: searching for bodies abandoned on the side of the road. They are worried about nightfall on September 19, 2016. If it does, their search team will be useless: they only have the patrol car’s lights and cell phone flashlights. So they rush ahead with the mission: to find two beloved priests from Poza Rica who had been kidnapped hours earlier.

Sometimes they are lucky and quickly find the bodies, tortured with military techniques that local organized crime learned from Los Zetas. Other times, the search drags on for several days until they are found decomposed or swollen from the city’s tropical heat, or devoured by the local fauna. But the police officers hope for a miracle: to find them still with a pulse.

The community searched for them tirelessly.

They review the files given to them at the police station: Priest Alejo Nabor Jiménez Juárez is 50 years old, and Sacristan José Alfredo Suárez is 30. Both have dark skin, are robust, and have short hair. They probably have a rosary around their neck or a crucifix in their pockets. With these clues, the uniformed officers search through ditches and wells. Until, suddenly, they see a pair of black shoes, and then another pair next to them. And in a ditch, next to the road leading to Papantla, all hope ends around 1:00 p.m.: the two priests are tied up, beaten, and dead.

The violence with which the killers treated their bodies raises a question: who, and why, would want to kill two beloved members of the Pozarricense community? What does Evil gain when it murders two representatives of God?

Young people don’t remember it, but there was a time when Poza Rica was a safe place. Life passed peacefully on its streets lined with palm trees and tall rosewoods, while its inhabitants benefited from two great natural resources: the fresh water of the Cazones River and the oil fields. Fish and oil.

This wealth helped build schools, technical high schools, and universities. The municipality soon stood out nationally for its high school enrollment rate. And with the diplomas came development and peace in the homes.

But one bad day, barbaric men arrived from the north. They were elite soldiers who in 1999 allied themselves with the Gulf Cartel in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, under the name Los Zetas; and in 2009, they broke away from their founders and declared war on them. So, these barbarians had to look for new places to settle and skirted the Gulf of Mexico to the south.

In Veracruz, they found an oasis: water, crude oil, ports, beaches, weak institutions, and infrastructure for moving drugs. By 2010, they had stormed Coatzintla, Tihuatlán, Tuxpan, and Poza Rica.

The Zetas in Veracruz: they went after taxi drivers, journalists, and businessmen.

Many didn’t notice this barbarian conquest. They were subtle, like soldiers advancing slowly through the undergrowth. First, Los Zetas recruited drug dealers, and those who refused were savagely murdered. Then, they did the same to both clean and dirty police officers working with local mafias. They then went after taxi drivers, journalists, and businessmen. Soon, they controlled religion with quotas for patron saint festivals and taxes on religious items like candles and baptismal medals.

“People stopped speaking out loud in the plazas. Everyone spoke softly, whispering. Fear does that: it silences you. We were talkative, but Los Zetas shut us up. The only safe place to talk was the church. In the confessionals, people talked about the disappeared, murders people saw, clandestine graves they heard about. That made priests targets for organized crime: they knew too much,” says a Veracruz businessman who requests anonymity.

Poza Rica was in that period of silence when the night of Sunday, September 18, 2016, arrived: two men entered the Parish of Our Lady of Fatima, located in the dangerous Petromex neighborhood, and pushed out the priest Alejo, who had been with the parish for six years, and the sacristan José Alfredo, who had only been in office for two months.

The parishioners noticed the unusual absence of the priests the next morning. Blood and broken furniture were found in the office. For many, the scene reminded them that three years earlier, in 2013, priest Hipólito Villalobos Lima, 45, and vicar Nicolás De la Cruz Martínez, 31, were murdered at the Parish of San Cristóbal in Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz. The Diocese had reported that churches were targets of extortion in Veracruz, and even priests were threatened by alleged criminal leaders.

The search for the two missing men began immediately. Parishioners joined the police. It took about ten hours to find the remains of the priest and the sacristan. The location of the discovery did not go unnoticed by those convinced that organized crime was behind the double homicide: a place known as “The Devil’s Curve.”

Veracruz wanted to classify the case as a robbery gone wrong

After the autopsies and the necessary procedures following a violent death, the bodies of the priests were returned in coffins the following Monday to the Church of Our Lady of Fatima. The Archbishop of Xalapa, Hipólito Reyes Larios, spoke to a moved and packed congregation—so many that many overflowed the church and listened to Mass from the street—about forgiveness for the murderers, but also about the moral duty to demand justice from the authorities.

By then, local authorities already had a hypothesis: “a crime over the heat of drinks.” The state attorney general, Luis Ángel Bravo Contreras, maintained to the press that the killers and the victims knew each other and had agreed to hold a meeting at the church. They secretly brought in liquor and became so drunk that they began to argue. The fight escalated until it spiraled out of control: the guests stole 5,000 pesos in alms and stole two trucks with the priest, the sacristan, and another religious man on board, who was eventually released alive and about whom little, if anything, is known.

The official version was supported by statements from the Catholic Church in the state, such as Vicar José Alberto Guerrero of the Diocese of Papantla, who repeatedly stated that none of the companions had communicated any threats. With no record of prior threats, authorities wanted to classify the case as a robbery gone wrong.

But the government’s plot ran into disbelief from the parishioners and the community of Pozarric, who had begun to formulate their own hypotheses. The most widely accepted view was that the double homicide was a message from Los Zetas to the Ministry of National Defense, which had announced that same month that the Sixth Military Region would carry out special operations in Poza Rica.

“Los Zetas were known for sending public messages to the authorities. YouTube videos, people hanging from bridges, and “narco-banners” in schools. The bodies of two priests conveniently left in a place called La Curva del Diablo sent a loud and clear message to the Mexican Army: here evil triumphs over good,” recalls the businessman interviewed.

Two other elements led neighbors to believe that something didn’t add up with the official version: there was no ransom demand, and the alleged robbery occurred with people inside the church. The most logical assumption, for the community, was that the theft occurred while the church was left alone.

But the most revealing detail was revealed weeks later by the press: Priest Alejo had been shot nine times, and sacristan José Alfredo had been shot once. This couldn’t have been the work of a pair of drunken robbers; that’s the signature of the Veracruz mafia. The Los Zetas style was present to tarnish the case.

Nine Years After the Double Homicide of Two Priests from Poza Rica

Both clergymen were found dead

This September marks nine years since the double homicide. So far, authorities have arrested two people: a man caught stealing a car in Mexico City and his accomplice, a petty thief nicknamed El Chino, who was arrested in Querétaro. Neither of the two were announced to the press as members of organized crime.

Veracruz authorities have also not reported whether they were able to bring them to trial or if any convictions for homicide were reached. It is impossible to know if they were ever imprisoned or remain in prison, or if they were released after a few hours due to lack of evidence. The Diocese of Veracruz maintains that authorities never updated them on the status of the detainees.

What is known are the figures reported by Jorge Atilano, a Jesuit priest and executive director of the National Dialogue for Peace: from 1990 to 2024, 67 priests or religious have been killed in a struggle for Mexican territory.

Other measurements, such as those by the Catholic Multimedia Center, show that between two and three priests are killed each year in Mexico. Celebrating Mass in areas where migrants pass through or where “derecho de piso” (land tax) collection is a near guarantee of threats and violence. Regarding these deaths, Mexico has climbed to the disgraceful top spot among the most dangerous countries in Latin America for a priest for 14 consecutive years.

Despite the arrests, the Poza Rica parishioners still retain the bitter taste left by the investigation: few believe the story of the drunken robbers, and many still repeat that the authorities colluded with Los Zetas to get rid of two men with extensive knowledge of crimes in the area, who could alert authorities at any moment to save the lives of their faithful.

“People still think of them as martyrs, especially Father Alejo because he had been with us for many years. He was well-known, very well-liked. If what those people wanted was money, they would have asked for a ransom. No, no… they didn’t want money, or why did they shoot him nine times? And why military-style torture? And why did they leave their bodies in plain sight?” the Veracruz businessman asks.

Doubts persist in the city. And just so that no one forgets that answers are still pending, someone has installed two white crosses right in the middle of “Devil’s Curve.” Almost a decade after the crime, Poza Rica refuses to forget the strange case of its murdered religious leaders.

Source: Milenio