Mexico's Catholic Cardinal receives early holiday gift - a pipe bomb hidden in a book

Mexican Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera was the recipient of an unwanted gift last week -- a pipe bomb concealed within a book. A package delivered to Mexico City's archdiocesan headquarters on Friday (November 25) raised immediate suspicions. Staff aides contacted police, who found the explosive device wrapped inside a volume entitled "Economic Law of Latin America." A spokesman for the cardinal's office said that he was never in any personal danger, since the package was not delivered to him.

Rivera Carrera, the highest ranking Roman Catholic official in the country, is known as the Primate of Mexico. A native of La Purísima in Durango state, he was named a cardinal in 1998.

Meanwhile, in Jalisco's capital of Guadalajara, where the bodies of 26 executed drug cartel victims were found in abandoned vehicles last week (http://mexicogulfreporter.blogspot.com/2011/11/narco-terror-hits-guadalajara-mexicos.html), Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez says that cartel violence throughout Mexico has reached "barbarous" levels. "Our priests are living side by side with drug traffickers, they (the traffickers) know them to be priests and let them pass by, but that doesn't make it any less worrisome," claims the archbishop of Mexico's second largest city. Sandoval Íñiguez says that in recent days he had a "premonition" that something terrible was going to happen in Guadalajara, which had been largely free of the worst acts of narco terror since the war against the drug cartels was launched in December 2006.

Archbishop says Los Zetas control at least two Mexican states: http://mexicogulfreporter.blogspot.com/2011/11/los-zetas-rule-durango-and-zacatecas.html

Will Mexico's Catholic Church try to stop the 2012 leftist presidential candidate?: http://mexicogulfreporter-supplement.blogspot.com/2011/11/mexican-archbishop-to-us-stop-leftist.html