International Christian Concern (ICC) has learned that on the afternoon of Jan. 26, 10 Christian families consisting of 18 adults and 10 children were expelled from the community of Tuxpan de Bolanos in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, for refusing to recant their faith. At 3 p.m., a town assembly agreement to evict these families from the community was executed by local citizens who gathered the Baptist believers into a pickup truck and abandoned them in the nearby mountains.
Currently, the regional president of the Baptist community, Omar Rodriguez, has made arrangements with the city government of Guadalajara to house the expelled families, while the city has also been asked to dispatch police patrols to transport them to safety.
This is the latest incident in a decades-long system of persecution of evangelical Christian in rural Mexico, as well as further evidence of the continued reluctance by the state and federal government to protect religious minorities. In June, ICC estimated that more than 70 open cases of religious persecution against minority Christian communities, each involving between 20-100 victims, existed in the states of Chiapas, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. Sadly, ICC can now add the state of Jalisco to this list. CONTINUE
