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MEXICO CITY—Mexicans struggling with increasingly gruesome crimes at home devoted the least attention in recent memory to the execution of one of their citizens in Texas.

With Mexico riveted on its own kidnap and killing of a 14-year-old boy, the normally anti-death penalty country expressed far less outrage at the death on Tuesday of Jose Medellin, a Mexican national convicted in the 1993 rape and murder of two Texas girls.

Some Mexicans on Wednesday even called for the death penalty at home.

“There is no reason for outrage. The man was a rapist,” said lawyer Gustavo Sanchez, 40, as he got his shoes shined on a Mexico City street. “If we had the death penalty here, there wouldn’t be so many crimes.”

His sentiments echoed Emilio Gamboa, the congressional leader of Mexico’s former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, who called for capital punishment earlier this week.

In contrast, the 1997 execution of Mexican Irineo Tristan Montoya for robbery and murder sparked angry demonstrations in Mexico. His body was given a hero’s welcome.

But the domestic kidnapping case dominated almost all of the daily front pages Wednesday, while Medellin’s execution merited small mentions lower down, if at all.

Fernando Marti, the son of a prominent businessman, was snatched on a Mexico City street in June and found dead last week, even though his family paid the ransom his captors demanded.

“The death of this boy reflects the depth of the social breakdown we have reached,” businessman Alfredo Harp Helu—himself a kidnapping victim—wrote in an open letter published Wednesday. “A change is urgently needed.”