By Walid Shoebat
“Neither the government nor priests can handle El Chapo” was a warning sent by Joaquin Guzman (El-Chapo) to what he considered his two biggest threats at the time: Christian priests and the government.
To ensure he was taken seriously, the note accompanied two corpses: soldiers that he arranged to be killed so everyone gets the message: you need to fear the drug cartel of Sinaloa, especially the infamous El Chapo.
The message was sent in response to Hector Gonzalez, the archbishop of the northern state of Durango, who raised fears of attacks on the clergy. Indeed, according to the Catholic Multimedia Center (CCM) Mexico is the most dangerous country in Latin America for priests.
The strange thing in America, is that so many act as if El-Chapo’s operation is a colorful background setting for popular American TV shows and movies. On Twitter, one comments “notice how much more love El Chapo gets compared to Trump”. Some tweets even offered to aid El-Chapo to kill Donald Trump. If one can use this as ‘the Twitter poll’ El-Chapo will be in the lead. Such are so many liberal democrats.
These people are not ignorant of El-Chapo. Everyone knows El Chapo’s operation is violent, deadly business populated not only by men who destroy lives through the distribution of toxic products, but also directly, through hired gunmen who intimidate and murder rivals, government officials, and even Christian priests. The cartel resulted in over 60,000 deaths.
There are even ISIS style beheadings against Christians by the cartel. One woman who worked for a Catholic newspaper in Tamaulipas was beheaded and some 1,100 priests reported receiving extortion threats in 2011 alone, while another 255 reported receiving death threats.
Long before ISIS, it was La Familia Michoacán who shocked Mexico, in October 2006, when they tossed 5 decapitated heads on to the floor of a Michoacán disco initiating the phenomenon for years to come. Even the poorest parish churches can attract extortion attempts, because the weekly collection baskets at Sunday mass bring in a constant trickle of cash. Is this what these commenters who prefer El Chapo over Trump want?
After an evangelical pastor was killed in Mexico State for refusing extortion demands, priests from 19 parishes in the state formally requested protection from the government, stating that they were also being threatened by armed extortionists.
What happens on the other side of the border will always effect the U.S.
While everyone thinks that this problem is not in their backyard, El Chapo ordered his young wife, Emma Coronel, the daughter of another Mexican drug lord, to give birth in California to secure U.S. citizenship for his children. Now El Chapo’s daughters will be able to petition for an unlimited number of relatives, real and fraudulent, to join them in the U.S. due to the law’s chain migration provisions. Drug kingpins now are attaining legal residence in the U.S., while their relatives and offspring would be milking the welfare state for benefits and tax credits including but not limited to free education of the cartel’s anchor babies.
Even El-Chapo himself has a California drivers license. Now that the U.S., is becoming a nation of imports, drugs is topping the list. The Sinaloa cartel has a long history of tunnel building, particularly along the US border where they were used to smuggle narcotics into America. The cartel has become so powerful that Forbes magazine listed Guzman among the ranks of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
The U.S., a nation that prides itself on being a nation of laws has become a nation of lawlessness from the bottom all the way to the top. It was the U.S. Supreme Court that forbade schools from withholding taxpayer funding that would go towards educating illegal aliens when Justice William Brennan declared, “No plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful”.
By law, now the “unlawful” can benefit.
And what about the Catholic clergy whom El-Chapo is making their life a living hell? Has Jeb Bush, the Catholic, said anything in their defense better than the Presbyterian Donald Trump? It was Donald Trump who was outspoken for Christian persecution. And if God never condemned Solomon’s wealth, are we to condemn Trump’s?
On Dec. 21, last year, four armed men barged into a Catholic seminary in the central Mexican city of Altamirano and kidnapped a Catholic pastor named Gregorio López Gorostieta. The problem for pastors is that they are the refuge for the poor in the face of criminal abuses by all sorts of government and corrupt movements.
Altamirano is the same part of Mexico where police arrested 43 student protesters and turned them over to a drug gang that killed them all and burned their bodies until they could no longer be identified. What was eye-opening also, was that another priest from Uganda, Father John Ssenyondo has been missing in Mexico since May, when he was abducted after refusing to baptize the daughter of local gangster. The strange thing is that his remains were found in a mass grave of the same 43 college student protesters.
On Christmas Eve, in response to the abduction of Fr. Gregorio López Gorostieta, dozens of priests, infuriated by the abductions, marched through the middle of Altamirano dressed in cassocks despite that cassocks have been banned in the streets of Mexico since the days of the revolution. Hundreds of parishioners trailed behind them. They called for peace, reconciliation, and the safe return of Father Gregorio. And the Diocese of Altamirano made a direct appeal to his captors:
“We fear for his physical safety and we believe there is nobility and kindness in you… If you have conditions for his release, make them known…. Let your hearts be touched and recall the services that we have performed for your families.”
So what was the response to the demonstrating priests? On Christmas Day, Father Gregorio’s body was found on the side of the highway out of town.
Father Gregorio is at least the third priest who was murdered in the region of Tierra Caliente alone.
There are many cases in other regions. Father Habacuc Hernández Benítez was shot to death in 2009, along with two of his seminary students, while driving on the road to Arcelia. Father Joel Román Salazar died in a car crash in 2013; his death was ruled an accident, but the suspicion of foul play persists. Three months ago, on Sept. 22, the body of Father Ascensión Acuña Osorio was found floating in the shallows of the Rio Balsas, not far from his parish in San Miguel Totolapan. Father Ascensión had earlier been reported kidnapped, and he was murdered even after a ransom was paid to his captors. His body showed signs of torture and one eyewitness recalled seeing knife slashes across the priest’s face.
Priests who are kidnapped are usually not counted as “killed” or “dead”, unless there is a body. Those kidnapped and not found, are not recorded on a drug war casualty list.
While many undermine the situation Trump brings up, reality shows that the Mexican problem next door rivals ISIS in its torture methods. The recovered bodies of priests depict odious, barbaric torture and killing. Decapitation, dismemberment, incineration, strangulation, drowning, torture and even rape are the methods used against priests in additional to the “conventional” killing methods of gunshot, or stabbings.
Throughout Mexico Catholic Priests create a safe haven for migrants and operate 95% of migrant shelters providing assistance, medical care and other forms of care. They are the greatest advocacy group, in and out of Mexico. Cartels consider this an intrusion into their source of revenue. Priests who run the migrant shelters such as Casa Migrante’s are constantly being threatened.
When Donald Trump led the way to expose the situation in Mexico and the borders, he was ridiculed by ignorants who do nothing to expose the Mexican style ‘ISIS’ problem next door. In Mexico, it is like in Islam, if one leaves the religion, they are executed. Likewise in Mexico, even the alcohol and drug rehab centers are attacked by cartels for repenting, resulting in the mass killing in drug rehab centers.
Padre Goyo, is arguably the most outspoken priest in Mexico today. Of the 7 Apatzingán Michoacán priests whose life have been threaten in 2014, he tops the list of most reviled by organized crime, and corrupt government, both municipal, state and federal. In 2014, Goyo’s brother, “Luis Jerónimo”, was kidnapped by the Caballeros Templarios. Luis Jerónimo, 39, was released after a few days of captivity and then decided to leave Mexico and appeared before the immigration authorities at the border crossing of San Ysidro, California to seek asylum. However, what happened to Luis should be an example of what Trump speaks about the “good Mexican people” vs. the bad whom the U.S. city of refuge system do give safe haven to. Instead of allowing Luis to enter as a persecuted immigrant, he was sent to a detention center, where he remained for nearly a year without being granted bail and exposed to immediate deportation.
In the last months of 2013, at least 5 priests were taken and all presumed dead in southern Tamaulipas. Carlos Ornelas Puga was kidnapped on November while priests Hipólito Villalobos Lima and Nicolas de la Cruz Martinez were executed in the parish of San Cristóbal de Ixhuatlán de Madero, Veracruz. In December two additional priests vanished in Tamaulipas.
Even the elderly nuns are not immune from the Mexican cartels. Two weeks ago, on June 29th, the bishop and the priests of the diocese of Tehuantepec Mexico expressed outrage regarding the violence against the clergy in the region. While the clergy were celebrating the Day of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, a convent was raided and the nuns despite their advanced age were tied and gagged and then robbed.
Americans need to wake up and deal with the reality. To all the democrat scum who preferred El Chapo over Trump, the only candidate who brought the problem to the forefront, perhaps if the situation is not seriously dealt with (which it won’t if Trump loses), it is likely that it will be your head on a platter.
Any questions?
We must be as candles that burn and melt in order to be a light to the world. In life always remember, Christians who are persecuted resemble Christ’s body “For I was hungry and you gave Me food …” So please consider the serious issue on Christian persecution, which will increase as we see the falling away unfolds before our very eyes. We are (Rescue Christians) who simply do what the label says “rescue Christians”. To see an example out of the thousands we rescue, click here, and listen to the amazing testimonies first hand on how you can help and make a difference, now in this life and for eternity.
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