Father Bertoldo Pantaleón Estrada, who disappeared on October 4, 2025, was found lifeless two days later, executed by gunfire in a scenario that screams impunity. It is not an isolated crime, but the latest link in a chain of misfortune that strangles the Catholic Church in Mexico, where 95 people have been silenced, including an archbishop, priests, a deacon, religious men and women, and laypeople, in addition to lamenting the absence of priests about whom nothing is known.
Father Pantaleón, parish priest of San Cristóbal in Mezcala, received the recognition and gratitude of a community that now suffers the absence of its pastor. In a Guerrero besieged by cartels that dispute every inch of land, the exercise of the priestly ministry is on terrain dominated by crime and narco. Extortions of peasants, the new ways of exploiting communities, the forced recruitment of young people, or the corruption that rots the roots of society. His murder is not an incidence of the climate of the land without rights, but a message that implies the signs of decomposition and of the “narcoculture” that has become entrenched to shape institutions as the crime wants, whether the Church, the State, or the constituted powers.
This is reflected in the insufficient investigations to find those responsible for Father Pantaleón’s murder. Arrests to appease the idea that in Mexico there is no impunity. A common narrative from those in charge of public security who try to contain what they cannot control. Guerrero is a model of the installation of narcodemocracy associated with crime groups that tolerate no dissent whatsoever.
Organized crime is not a «social conflict»; it is an asymmetric power that has occupied the vacuum of authority that the political class itself took care to transform. And everything points to the fact that Father Bertoldo’s murder is a sacrifice on the altar of horror in which thousands of Mexicans have been sacrificed, but with a particularity: The Church is not above that dark power. The message from organized crime is clear: they rule this country, they put it at war where they please, they manipulate officials, penetrate the economy, corrupt soldiers and sailors, and even manufacture saints and cults. If the Church is not with them…
No need to be a prophet or a doomsayer to say that impiety, cruelty, torture, sadism, pain, laments, wounds, buzzing bullets, dismembered bodies, and disappearances will continue endlessly with this structural sin that puts the country on the edge of the abyss.
As the bishops rightly point out in the Global Pastoral Project PGP 2031-2033: “It seems that this situation of violence has overwhelmed the authorities in many parts of the country; criminal groups have established themselves as true owners and lords of spaces and power fiefdoms, and, due to the fury and terror capacity of many of them, they have put the strength of the law and order to the test. There are many sufferings that, because of the violence over these last years, have accumulated in the families of the Mexican people,” (No 58)
If Father Pantaleón was murdered, anyone can be murdered. Let us remember, anyone can be… another activist or priest, a catechist or minister, a pastor or a bishop…