Mexican Massacre Opens Wounds Of Government Mistrust Critics Say Paramilitary Groups Given Free Rein
As federal investigators scoured the killing fields in this tiny town for evidence, the Christmas lights still flickered Wednesday above the Nativity scene in the deserted chapel where villagers were praying two days earlier when gunmen descended and killed 45 people.
Human rights groups and church leaders assailed the Mexican government, saying its failure to move firmly and quickly enough to disarm paramilitary groups and negotiate a solution to the 4-year-old conflict in the southern state of Chiapas had laid the groundwork for Monday’s massacre. They called for renewed talks between the government and Zapatista guerrillas, who staged an armed uprising in January 1994 but later agreed to take part in negotiations that have been stalled since September 1996.
“The direct responsibility for these bloody acts rests on (President) Ernesto Zedillo … and the secretary of the Interior, who for years gave the green light to a counterinsurgency program presented by the federal army,” Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatista military leader, asserted in a four-page communique.
Zedillo bitterly condemned the massacre and Interior Minister Emilio Chuayffet denied that the federal government bore any responsibility, “even by omission.” Both men renewed calls for reviving the peace talks.
Attorney General Jorge Madrazo, who was ordered by the Mexican president to take over the case from state authorities, said his agents were questioning three suspects, although no arrests had been made.
But survivors of the attack began to suggest answers to why armed attackers would kill unarmed refugees, including 21 women and 15 children, an infant among them.
This was the worst outburst of violence in Mexico since a the 12-day Zapatista rebellion in January 1994 claimed at least 145 lives in the southern state of Chiapas.
Survivors said this massacre may be traced to disputes stemming from the apparently successful organization by pro-Zapatista villagers of “alternative local power structures” in recent months - a direct challenge to the decades-old dominance in Chiapas of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
That has threatened PRI supporters in contested Chiapas towns and led them to take up arms against those suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, the survivors maintained.
The PRI has insisted that it does not condone violence nor has it encourage any brutal paramilitaries.
As armed soldiers stood guard, Madrazo’s investigators searched a clearing outside the simple clapboard church in the tiny village of Acteal, as well as the surrounding paths leading down the mountainside to the river banks where the villagers were shot and hacked with machetes.
Acteal, in the Chenalho district about 40 miles north of the regional center of San Cristobal de las Casas, was eerily silent on Christmas Eve. Its wooden shacks were abandoned with coffee and corn crops left in the sun to dry, and chickens and dogs scratching for food. Bloodstains marked the paths leading from the church down to the river, and a once-white shirt was stained red with blood was discarded along the slippery, muddy track.
The impromptu church the refugees had built was unscathed, save for a few bullet holes. Inside, most of the floor space was filled with bags of clothing donated by the Red Cross for the residents, most of whom had relocated from other towns in the mountain region to escape the conflict there.