A married couple who had served for 28 years as Baptist missionaries in Mexico were murdered on last week Tueday at their home near Monterrey in El Cercado, Santiago, Nuevo Leon.

The area has suffered heavily from attacks by drug cartels in recent weeks, including the murder of the mayor of El Cercado, leading to the tentative conclusion that the crime was committed by people serving narcotics traffickers.

About 70 Protestant Christians lived in the village of San Rafael Tlanalapan, Puebla state, until last week Monday, when they faced a frightening ultimatum – leave immediately or be “crucified or lynched.”

Traditionalist Catholics in the village reportedly threatened to burn down or otherwise destroy their homes.

David Romo, considered the high priest of a cult with millions of followers across the Americas, is accused of kidnapping and posing as a member of the feared Zetas drug cartel.

The “Santa Muerte” cult has become popular among drug traffickers in Mexico, in part because followers believe the skeletal figure of the female “saint” may protect them from death or arrest.

“Traditionalist Catholic” leaders last month expelled 57 evangelical Christians from towns in two states for refusing to participate in their religious festivals.

Leaders of traditionalist Catholicism, a mixture of Roman Catholicism and native rituals, expelled 32 Christians from their homes in a village in Hidalgo state and another 25 from a town in Oaxaca; in each case, the evangelicals were deprived of their property for refusing to participate in drunken festivals that included worship of Catholic icons.

The heads of 11 decapitated bodies discovered in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula last week may have been burned in a ritual, investigators said.

Police said they found an altar to the skeletal figure of the “Santa Muerte,” an unofficial patron saint of death, in the home of two men arrested in connection with the slayings, while several scorched spots were discovered in a nearby clearing.

Nabor Cardenas, a defrocked Roman Catholic priest known as “Papa Nabor” and founder of the New Jerusalem religious community, died Tuesday of renal and respiratory problems.