On October 26, 2025, the Diocese of Tarahumara issued a heartbreaking statement denouncing the bloody events that occurred in Guachochi, where a multiple homicide left seven fatalities amid a crossfire that demonstrates, as in other parts of Mexico, that the rule of law has already capitulated and is absent in failed conditions.
The parish priest of the Guachochi Cathedral, Father Enrique Urzúa, did not raise his voice again on social media in a homily that drew attention for the abandonment suffered by the Tarahumara, left to chance and at the mercy of criminals. This denunciation is not an isolated lament; it is a collective cry against an impunity that corrodes the state of Chihuahua, where 90% of crimes go unpunished.
The diocese demanded the federal absence in the Sierra where armed groups operate with total freedom displacing Rarámuri communities and sowing terror. Bishop Juan Manuel González Sandoval, amid the mourning, recalled that it is impossible to get used to the violence and death in the Tarahumara where not only poverty kills, but violence also annihilates entire cultures, with indigenous communities forced to flee due to dispossession and lead, and where the Church has denounced the serious crisis scenario where the absence of the law leaves everyone only with the weapon of faith and hope, accompanied by one of the last factors of stability, the local Catholic Church.
But this wound does not bleed in isolation. It links to a national pattern of aggression against the clergy. In the last 20 years, violence has escalated, with 81 priests murdered since 1990 and 12 just in the governments of López Obrador and Sheinbaum, to which are added other regrettable cases for not knowing what has happened to them, that of the disappeared priests.
Father Ernesto Baltazar Hernández Vilchis, from the Diocese of Cuautitlán, who disappeared just on October 27, 2025 in Tultepec, State of Mexico, was last seen in his vehicle and the diocese has offered full cooperation to the authorities, who so far only issue search bulletins. His absence, in a context of growing violence, leaves, of course, doubt and uncertainty about his whereabouts and the results of the investigations in a country where more than 100,000 people, simply, nothing is known about them.
This pattern repeats in the disappearance of Father Santiago Álvarez Figueroa, from the Diocese of Zamora, Michoacán, which occurred on December 27, 2012. More than a decade later, there are no advances, no body, no vehicle in Michoacán, where violence is already part of the political and social system.
A similar fate befell Father Carlos Ornelas Puga from the Diocese of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, who, on November 3, will mark twelve years disappeared since 2013.
Finally, Father Francisco Núñez Martínez disappeared in February 2025. Although initial reports gave him as located, to date the absence of this priest persists.
In a country with 10 priests murdered in the previous administration and two more in the current one, the security strategy does not work and seems headed for resounding failure while cases of violence accumulate weekly. The facts leave no room for doubt. In the Tarahumara, as in other dioceses of Mexico, the Church becomes an urgent factor of stabilization of which, in many regions, the authorities are already incapable; on the other hand, it mourns its disappeared like thousands of families weep for the absent at home. Stabilization and disappearances, a harsh paradox that warns us that the Catholic Church in Mexico is not exempt from pain.