MEXICO CITY — In a rare public airing, a senior Catholic prelate has denounced control of Mexico’s Michoacan state by violent drug traffickers, challenging official government claims and igniting a fierce debate.

Miguel Patiño, the bishop of Apatzingan, one of Michoacan’s largest cities and a headquarters for the state’s main criminal network, made his charges in an open letter and then in a series of interviews.

He said Michoacan had essentially become a failed state because authorities are afraid of — or in collusion with — organized crime figures. The state has long been dominated by a gang calling itself the Knights Templar, and its forerunner, La Familia, groups that specialized in producing methamphetamine for the U.S. market. They have branched out into rampant extortion schemes, kidnapping and other illicit activities.

In Michoacan, an “absence of law and justice” prevails, Patiño wrote, “provoking insecurity, fear, sadness, anger, mistrust, rivalries, indifference, death and oppression.”

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