CIUDAD ALTAMIRANO, Mexico — Assassins have killed more than 11,000 people amid Mexico's 30-month campaign against organized crime, slaughtering gangsters, police officers, soldiers and the occasional innocents alike with unfettered gusto.

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.

Rival drug trafficking organizations — producing marijuana and other narcotics in remote areas — have been warring in recent years.

An April battle near Arcelia, the town where Hernández and the teenagers died, killed 15 gunmen and a soldier. Shootouts have become frequent on the streets of Altamirano, the town where the diocese has its headquarters.

“This is a society that developed very isolated,” said Alejandro Guzmán, 38, a priest who acts as the diocese spokesman and who knew Hernández for 18 years. “There are a lot of families very rooted in violence.”

Hernández's death is the first of a clergyman linked directly to organized crime since the 1993 killing of Juan Jesús Posadas, the cardinal in Guadalajara. Posadas was shot as he arrived to catch a flight at that city's airport. Mexican officials said the gunmen mistook the elderly, robed cleric for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, a powerful gangster 30 years the prelate's junior.

Fears of greater violence against the Catholic clergy surged this spring after the archbishop of Durango announced that “everyone except the authorities” knows that Guzmán is living in a remote mountain village in that state.

Several days after that statement made national news, two undercover military officers were found murdered near the village in question.

“Neither governments nor priests are ever going to be able to handle El Chapo,” read a placard left with the bodies. Local bishops have demanded that authorities track down and arrest those guilty in Hernández's death. But that's not likely. Gangland murders almost always go unsolved in Mexico.

Two weeks after the slaying, police investigators have arrested no one or offered any theories as to why the priest and the boys were targeted. Nor have they conducted much of an investigation, failing even to visit the seminary where Hernández lived or worked or to talk with colleagues.

His fellow priests said they would continue with a recently launched campaign to promote peace in the diocese, undeterred by Hernández's death. The doors of the houses where parish priests live remain open, the gate of the seminary grounds unguarded.

“To serve God is not to live in peace,” declares a pendant hanging in Hernández's small living quarters at the seminary. “But to use yourself up for the good of others.”