The pope is expected to visit Michoacán and Juárez, areas struck by violence and upheaval – which may cause some discomfort for the president and government

Pope's focus on violence and poor likely to make for 'uncomfortable' Mexico visit

Father Andrés Larios blessed the vigilantes as they took up arms to run off a marauding drug cartel in Mexico’s Michaocán state. Months later, he watched in dismay as the federal government jailed the militiamen and pinned police badges on a new rural security force which included gunmen accused of the same crimes they were supposed to stamp out.

Violence has somewhat diminished in Michaocán since then. But Larios, a parish priest in the rugged Tierra Caliente region, expresses hope a higher authority will soon intervene in the state: Pope Francis.

The pope plans to visit Mexico in early 2016 and is expected to travel to Michaocán – where outward migration, government neglect and drug trafficking have caused upheaval for years.

“The pope picked the state of Michoacán for this very issue of violence,” said Larios, speaking from the village of Coacomán, 600km (372 miles) west of Mexico City. “We’re expecting a hopeful message from him.”



Pope Francis is expected to arrive in Mexico on 12 February for a visit that is likely to carry political and pastoral agendas and take him to states and cities afflicted with insecurity, inequality and predation on migrants transiting the country.



Church officials say details of Francis’s trip will be announced 12 December. But the visit is already expected to focus on Mexico’s peripheral places and poorest inhabitants.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pilgrims worship at the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Photograph: Danny Lehman/Corbis

That could prove problematic for Mexico’s image-conscious president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who has pursued an agenda of economic reforms, while staying mostly silent on security and human rights.



“It will be an uncomfortable visit,” says Jesuit father David Velasco, professor in the socio-political and judicial studies department at the ITESO university in Guadalajara. “The Mexican government has a strategy of painting a fantasy of a country that doesn’t exist.”



Details of the itinerary – confirmed by diocesan spokesmen and Mexico’s foreign ministry – show the pope plans a visit to Ciudad Juárez, once the murder capital of the world and notorious for the unsolved killings of hundreds of women.



Other destinations include Michoacán, Mexico City and southern Chiapas state, where the Zapatista uprising flared in the 1990s.



It’s a sharp contrast with Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who visited Mexico’s conservative Catholic heartland of Guanajuato state in 2012, but said nothing on the violence that has left more than 100,000 Mexicans dead and thousands more missing over the past decade.



The pope’s priorities also contrast with the country’s conservative church hierarchy, which has made mostly timid pronouncements on violence and pursued close ties with the political class.



“He is going to be in places where Mexico has been accused of having a deep human rights crisis,” said Velasco.



Peña Nieto has twice invited Pope Francis to visit Mexico – home to the world’s second-largest Catholic population and where 83% of people still profess the faith.



That eagerness to get close to the pope conrasts with the protocol of many years, when Mexican presidents and politicians publicly avoided prelates and professed an anti-clerical ethos.

That ended with former president Carlos Salinas, who restored Mexico-Vatican relations in 1992, removed restrictions on the church owning property and allowed priests and nuns to wear their habits in public for the first time since the Mexican revolution.



Church observers say Salinas used the pope’s presence in Mexico to legitimize a suite of structural reforms and privatizations, which marked his administration. They see a scandal-plagued Peña Nieto and other politicians trying the same with Francis.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vigilantes, or members of the community police, ride in a vehicle through the streets of Apatzingan, in Michoacan state, on 9 February 2014. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

“It is one of their best resources for legitimizing themselves,” Velasco says. “I don’t think that it will go well because (Peña Nieto’s) performance has been so poor.”

Expectations appear high among ordinary Mexicans. A December survey by polling firm Parametría showed 91% of Mexicans aware of his arrival; 38% said the pope’s visit would “help reduce violence in the country”.



Catholic leaders express similar expectations and say the pope is certain to speak up for victims of the country’s violence, who include an estimated 11 priests murdered since 2013.



The papal nuncio has already celebrated Mass for the families of the 43 students who went missing after they were attacked by police last year. Francis later elevated Michocán’s most senior prelate, Mons Alberto Suárez Inda, to cardinal – a move interpreted as the Vatican showing concerns over his security.



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Francis is almost certain to reprise the focus on migrants which was a central theme in his visit to the US earlier this year. Mexico stepped up enforcement of its immigration laws and is now detaining and deporting more undocumented Central Americans than the United States.

His trip to Chiapas could also be interpreted as an attempt to show that the church is concerned with indigenous issues as the state’s mostly Mayan population have left Catholicism in droves, says Andrew Chesnut, religious studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and an expert on Catholicism in Latin America.



It would also revive the legacy of former Chiapas bishop Samuel Ruiz, who promoted a preferential option for the indigenous population and was one of the few prominent followers of the progressive movement of Liberation Theology among senior Mexican churchmen.

The pope’s addressing of migrant issues comes as Mexico steps up enforcement of its immigration laws and is now detaining and deporting more Central Americans without the proper papers than the United States.

Pope Francis has been coy about his motives for Mexico, though he recently laid responsibility for the trip on the country’s wildly popular patron saint, telling reporters: “If it weren’t for Our Lady of Guadalupe, I wouldn’t go.”