ACTEAL

The greatest slaughter
of harmless people at prayer

A church is being built in Mexico on the site where 45 Indios were killed while praying. The killers' action followed a series of attacks, intimidation and bullying directed at this community by the army and the large landowners

by Gianni Valente

	Women praying at the site of the massacre.

     The martyrs of Acteal are still here. They were buried together, two rows of bodies in the bare earth of a slight slope. The savage bursts of gunfire and the machete blows aimed in fury at children, harmless women and men fleeing through the jungle have even thinned out some of the vegetation, baring the patch of earth where now the victims of the worst slaughter in recent history of Christians at prayer rest side by side. Now we are told that a church will be built on the spot. Already the first bricks have been carried there in procession.
     It happened on December 22 when the Indios, driven out of Acteal two days before, had gathered in fasting and prayer in the wood and sheet-metal hut that served as a church. "We were offering the Rosary for ourselves, for our lives, asking God and Our Lady for peace for our people," says catechist Augustin, one of the survivors. For months the mountains around Chenalhó, a few kilometers from San Cristóbal, have been blasted by the wind of violence and terror that has descended on the native communities of the Chiapas over recent years. An interminable series of attacks, reprisals, killings and pillaging, a strategy of "low intensity war" consisting of military occupation and dirty operations entrusted to paramilitary groups. The aim is to wear down and terrify the people involved in the native uprising that has been a thorn in the side of the Mexican Government since 1994. It was known that the paramilitary squads had arrived in the area and that was why the peasants of Acteal set themselves to pray, hoping to be spared from violence.

Soldiers searching a native village. There are now 40,000 soldiers engaged in anti-Zapatist action in Chiapas

     The killers came out of the forest, climbing up from the valley bottom, all wearing blue uniforms and with their faces covered. The high-powered bullets they used can still be seen, embedded in the walls of the church hut. "They even cut to pieces four pregnant women," Augustin goes on, "and some children escaped by lying still under the bodies of their slaughtered mothers.
     And yet Acteal does not reek of death. There isn't even the air of desolation one breathes lower down at Chenalhó, which is in the hands of the military and where everything seems to have stopped, even the church is abandoned and the parish priest forced into hiding because of death threats. Here among the huts that escaped the attack, along the steep and slippery paths, friends and relations of the martyrs continue to live, work, pray, as they do every day. The most remarkable thing about this inaccessible spot, now a place of pilgrimage for reporters, photographers and militants from all over the world inflamed by the cause of the Zapatist uprising, is precisely the daily life that the television cameras cannot capture, a life happy within the pain and wounds of these difficult times. It may well be the blessing that the martyrs of Acteal are already bestowing on their friends, on those who remain. Every day, at five in the afternoon, the whole community gathers to pray around a small altar, a small wooden table with cross and candles, a few bare yards from where the 45 are buried. The catechist calls, and from the gullies, the forest, the huts they emerge. One by one, in pairs, in small chattering groups. Teenagers, silent men, small girls with even smaller brothers in pouches on their backs, and women in brightly colored dresses. They will wait for at least half an hour to see who comes late, chatting confidentially while the smaller children play in the mud. Then a nod from the catechist and everybody kneels, the women cover their heads, and kneeling in the muddy red soil they say the Rosary. When the prayers are said they get up, they greet one another, some staying to talk, others getting back to their affairs.

	Left, the hut in which the Indios driven out of Acteal were praying at the moment of the killing. A church will be built on the site of the massacre. The friends of the victims have already brought the first bricks in procession (right)

     Higher up, near the road, Mariana is playing at ring-a-ring-of-roses with the little ones. She is a small dark girl from Mexico City, a militant member of Enlace civil, the non-governmental organization that sets up the "peace camps" close to villages and refugee camps where Mexican and foreign volunteers work to help the Indios communities and guard against further paramilitary attacks. Here in Acteal, one can pray in peace not least because of this precarious human shield.

The General and the
Gospel of Saint Mark
"Acteal: a crime of State," La Palabra, the bulletin of the Center for information and analysis of the Chiapas, writes unequivocally. More than a month later the massacre in the church a few days before Christmas, something the Government first tried to pass off as a feud between rival clans, is keeping the whole of Mexico in uproar. The international pressure continues, as do protest marches throughout the world, and meanwhile the press and opposition groups are churning out information, evidence and certain proof of the cover the government has been providing for the paramilitary groups. People are not satisfied with the top level dismissals in State bodies offered as a sop to the fierce indignation aroused by the massacre. They are demanding the implementation of the San Andrés Agreements which the government signed with representatives of the Zapatist Army of National Liberation, to which it paid lip service while then attempting a "military solution" of the Chiapas uprising.
     But in all of this, amid the power clashes, the plundering, the geopolitical and economic interests in play in Chiapas, Acteal is also the most tragic manifestation of the long series of attacks, intimidation and violence suffered by Christians and by the Church in this part of the world. They have been targeted because they are aware that, as Cardinal Lorscheider said at the recent Synod for America and as the whole of tradition makes clear, the cry of a suffering people is the very cry of Christ on the cross.
     In San Cristóbal, Pablo Romo, the young and dynamic Dominican in charge of the Center for Human Rights Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, speaks of a "strategy of intimidation and repression of the native revolt in the Chiapas, where in the last elections more than 70 percent of the population accepted the policy of abstention suggested by the EZLN and backed the demand for administrative autonomy and a social policy made by the men led by sub-commandant Marcos, even though they did not share the policy of armed resistance". A regime tied to Washington by a sophisticated treaty of trade cooperation designed to the strictest criteria of neo-liberal globalization, one that sought to be received into the club of western capitalism, is now accused of having gone for a military solution of the crisis in Chiapas, provoking an escalation of violence that prepared the way for the activities of the paramilitary groups. "I don't want to believe," Romo explains, "that the government directly planned the massacre.

A child and her mother coming out from Mass in La Realidad. In the massacre of last December 22 in Acteal by a paramilitary group, 45 Indios were killed and another 25 wounded. The victims included 15 children and 21 women, four of whom were pregnant

But there is a shared responsibility for having arrived at this situation of low intensity war, the result of the total ignoring of the San Andrés accords, signed in February 1996 with the Zapatist insurgents." Within the never ending series of violence and aggression wrecking the lives of the native communities, Romo also points to the episodes of bloodshed that have directly struck the Christians and the Church: "A real chain of aggression: there was the attack on the sister of Monsignor Ruiz Garcia and then, on November 4, the bullets fired by the paramilitary at the motorcade taking Bishops Ruiz Garcia and Vera López to Tila. Twelve churches have been shut down by the paramilitary groups, Passionists abducted by the police, Jesuits tortured, foreign missionaries expelled. The Altamirano hospital has suffered continuous attacks and in December 1996 a molotov cocktail was thrown at the Dominican house in San Cristóbal. And then continuous aggression and death threats to individual catechists, priests and missionaries". This violence was the culmination of a campaign aimed at instigating hatred. Pablo Romo explains further: "For years the catechists and priests here have been described as a group of Communist agitators, even to the point of accusing Bishop Ruiz Garcia of selling arms to the guerrillas. Instead of dealing with the real reasons for the native revolt, they put around the idea that it was all being stirred up, fomented by the Church. Psychological warfare that created agitation in many native communities". In the end, after the massacre at Acteal, the general in charge of all government forces in Chiapas presented as "proof" of the links between the guerrillas and the Church, certain publications of the diocese of San Cristóbal found in an EZNL base. The publications in question were a hymn book, a catechism explaining the sacrament of baptism and devotion to the Rosary, and the Gospel of Saint Mark translated into one of the native dialects. The fact that the Evangelist and the sub-commandant leading the guerrillas share the same name created great excitement among the wittier soldiers, convinced as they were that they had laid hands on the proof that the diocese was giving its imprimatur to works of revolutionary indoctrination. "At that point," Romo concludes, "the lies in the propaganda became clear and messages of solidarity came from the entire Mexican Church, from all its several and different elements. When the Gospels themselves are passed off as manuals of guerrilla war ...".

	The funeral of the victims of the Acteal massacre. Every evening the survivors kneel to say the Rosary near the graves of their friends and relatives.

The Sons of Bartolomé
In pro-government newspapers like the Nacional, the mouthpiece of the Ministry of the Interior, the systematic defamation of the Church in Chiapas, of its bishops, of its catechists, continues. An ancient hatred comes across in its venomous leaders. The Bishops of San Cristóbal Samuel Ruiz Garcia and Rául Vera López are accused of "fundamentalism" and "theocratic temptations". Their defence of the Indios is even alleged to be the cause of the neglect and poverty of the native communities, a hindrance to their "integration" into the neo-capitalist productive cycle. The very same "theocratic mistake," they explain, "committed by the Jesuits in the 16th century reducciones of the Guarani Indians, and earlier still, by Bartolomeo de Las Casas, the Dominican first bishop of San Cristóbal, who in order to defend the Indios from oppression clashed with the conquistadors and the Spanish prelates who justified the massacre and violence theologically in the name of the 'Christianization' of the New World".

The cross and an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe mark the burial place

     In past years lightning promotion has been showered on theologians and monsignors who earned a reputation as hammers of Liberation Theology by attacking Samuel Ruiz Garcia and support of the native side by the diocese of San Cristóbal. It is a diocese of few priests - and bishops and priests alike are used to walking into the forest - where the Christian life of people in the 2,000-strong native community is tended by 7,000 native catechists and 200 native deacons in orders. They have often been described as dangerous liberationists, proponents of a twisted and half schismatic pastoral theology for natives. But the faith described to me by Alonso, a catechist with a face full of goodness, is made up of a few simple things, the everlasting things: the love of Jesus, prayer to beseech Him for good in one's life, "because it is certain that Jesus came to be with the poor and we are the poor". Alonso used to read the Gospel and lead Sunday prayers in the area of Los Chorros, near Acteal. An armed band of anti-Zapatists arrived which included local militants from the government party. They demanded that households pay a "war tax" and when refused attacked the village and plundered the houses and the coffee harvest. Now with his wife and their ten children Alonso is a guest with other evacuees of a religious house on the outskirts of San Cristóbal. There is no trace in what he and his companions say of a justification of violence, not even of the Zapatist variety, because, as they declared, "Jesus does not want weapons but peace and justice". Some of them are getting ready to go on a pilgrimage to the Our Lady of Guadalupe arranged by the diocese to ask Our Lady for that peace that Jesus promised to the poor. Under the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the waiting-room of the curia of San Cristóbal someone has written: "Most Holy Mother, Queen of Mexico, protect with your mantle our brethren of the Chiapas. Free them from the evil of injustice".