Christmas Lights Still Burn in Chiapas Massacre Chapel

ACTEAL, Mexico — 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,” Subcommander Marcos, the Zapatista military leader, asserted in a four-page communique.

Zedillo bitterly condemned the massacre, and Interior Minister Emilio Chuayffet Chemor denied that the federal government bore any responsibility, “even by omission.” Both men renewed calls for reviving the peace talks.

Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, 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.

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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 the 12-day Zapatista rebellion in January 1994 claimed at least 145 lives in Chiapas.

Survivors said Monday’s 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 said.

The PRI has insisted that it does not condone violence nor encourage any brutal paramilitaries.

As armed soldiers stood guard, Madrazo’s investigators searched a clearing outside the simple clapboard church in Acteal, as well as the surrounding paths leading down the mountainside to the riverbanks where the villagers were shot and hacked with machetes.

Acteal, in the Chenalho district 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 stained 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.

The villagers were members of an organization called the Abejas, which sought “a new path of peace and a society of freedom,” Pedro Vazquez Ruiz said.

He was among about 200 survivors from Acteal who took refuge Wednesday in a school in the adjacent village of Polho--a stronghold of the Zapatista rebels that has declared itself the “autonomous community of Polho” and is perhaps the best-known example of “alternative power structures” in Chiapas.

Vazquez said he had fled from another village to settle in Acteal in October “because the PRI-istas were demanding 400 pesos from each of us so they could buy guns and attack the sympathizers of the Zapatistas. They said they would kill us if we didn’t pay, so I left.

“They don’t want us to organize ourselves,” Vazquez said. “They want to oust us from our homes, take our crops and even take our animals.”

Augusto Gomez Perez said he had managed to flee down the mountainside and avoid the marauding gunmen. But he burst into tears as he recalled how he and other survivors ventured back to the area Monday evening after the shooting subsided, and “we discovered many of the bodies. We saw some on top of others, dead women clutching their dead children.”

He couldn’t go on, mumbling instead only, “so much sadness.”

His nephew, Juan Vazquez Luna, 15, lost both his parents in the massacre. He said he had run while his father had decided to try to crawl to safety--a fatal mistake.

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While Zedillo has defended his administration and pledged full action against the perpetrators regardless of their political affiliation, Raul Vera, assistant bishop in San Cristobal de las Casas, released a copy of a letter he wrote to the interior minister on Oct 18, saying: “We have information that paramilitary groups are multiplying . . . former soldiers and police are training civilians to fight their brothers, ruling-party congressmen are sponsoring the sale and the trafficking of weapons, acting as protectors and coordinators of the various paramilitary groups.”

Thomas Crane, a Santa Rosa, Calif., doctor and a member of the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, said his group visited the Chenalho district in early December and found mass evictions of pro-Zapatista villagers resulting in more than 6,000 refugees living in crude shacks in areas such as Acteal.

“There was clearly no institutional interest in investigating this. They turned a blind eye,” Crane said.

Several convoys of soldiers were pouring into the Chenalho district from San Cristobal de las Casas and the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez, and federal police threw up roadblocks and searched passersby.

Through his tears, Gomez said villagers in Acteal had always joined together for Christmas Eve, making a special communal meal “to honor the baby Jesus. But now, I feel too much pain in my heart. I can’t eat at all.”