Mexico's drug war enveloping clergy

And now the killers have claimed Habacuc Hernández Benítez, 39, a Catholic priest whom colleagues and townspeople describe as a self-effacing, hard-working, humanity-loving servant of God.

“This is a beginning, an indication that they don't respect anything,” said Othon Carranza, rector of the seminary where Hernández worked as a recruiter and fundraiser. “To be a priest doesn't mean anything. He was just one more victim of this violence.”

Hernández was murdered gangland style on June 13 — along with two teenage recruits to the priesthood — at the entrance to Arcelia, a narcotics-country town near this isolated market center in Guerrero state, 160 miles southwest of Mexico City. The three were stopped by gunmen riding in two sport utility vehicles, forced out of their pickup and shot repeatedly in the back.

The killings come amid renewed fears that priests and other religious figures are being caught up in Mexico's bloodletting. Mobsters have told bishops to keep silent. Priests working in communities controlled by gangsters have been warned not to meddle in underworld affairs.

“They have threatened several of us,” Carranza said. “They think we know a lot of things because we hear confessions, or that we would tell people to rise against them.”

In his work for the seminary, Hernández traveled frequently to small communities throughout the Diocese of Altamirano, a huge area that includes some of Mexico's more rugged and lawless mountains.

Like other local priests, colleagues say, Hernández routinely traveled as much as 18 hours by car and horseback to minister to the diocese's more remote villages. His own roots — he was among 10 children born to a poor farming family in the mountains north of Altamirano and at one time worked illegally in Texas to save the money to pay for his religious studies — allowed Hernández easy relations with often wary local people.

“He was very humble,” said Javier Castrejón, a priest who lived next to Hernández at the seminary, where a funeral Mass for Hernández drew a crowd of 6,000. “He was very much appreciated by people.”

The villages, towns and farms within the diocese — known collectively as “the hot lands” — have been long infamous as one of Mexico's more violent areas. Longstanding family feuds, revenge killings and criminal gangs abound.