In the chapel below, a group of women and children sorted through a bundle of used clothes brought to Acteal by the local Catholic diocese. Most of the village men were off working their fields. The few who remained were praying in the chapel, led by Alonso Vázquez, the community’s principal catechist, who had insisted on three days of fasting and prayer to help the villagers prepare for the imminent celebration of Christ’s birth. As the gunfire provoked screams and desperate attempts to find refuge, Vázquez was one of the first to die, eight bullets fired into his back. The devout of the village maintain that as he fell he muttered, in the manner of any good martyr: “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” His ten-year old son Manuel, who had managed to hide in the underbrush, said the killers then killed his pregnant mother and cut open her stomach, laughingly removing the fetus and throwing it down the hillside. The scene might seem implausible were it not for the autopsies ordered by the Chiapas state prosecutor, which indicated many bodies had been mutilated by machetes. One body, “Corpse Number 16,” the autopsy report stated, was “an approximately 32-year old female, who died of perforation to her abdominal viscera by a cutting instrument . . .the abdominal cavity had been opened up and the product of approximately 28 weeks extracted.”

By the time the killing was finished, 45 people had died: 19 women, 19 children, and seven men. The survivors of the Acteal massacre also count the unborn child, making the final death toll 46. The bodies were returned to Acteal for burial on Christmas morning. During the burial mass, Samuel Ruiz, the bishop of the diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, declared, “This is the saddest Christmas of our lives. It seems the baby has been born dead.”

Blaming the victims

Why did a group of mostly poor Tzotzil Indians kill so many other poor Tzotzil Indians that morning of December 22, 1997?

The Mexican government, which first denied the violence had taken place and prevented journalists or the Red Cross from reaching the village until it had rearranged the scene, next tried to blame the victims. The killings were the result of “inter communal or even inter family conflicts,” declared the attorney general. Reporters from a national TV network, TV Azteca, were given a memo ordering them to spin the story so that the public would think that “the fight is between Indians. . .[and] the causes are land and religion.”

Yet a secret military document–prepared by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas for the Mexican military and obtained by the weekly Proceso–indicated the killings were part of a larger strategy to counteract the emergence of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). “We must secretly organize certain sectors of the civil population . . .military operations will include the training of these self-defense and paramilitary formations,” the report stated.

The Zapatistas had emerged on the world scene at the beginning of 1994 when they seized San Cristóbal de las Casas and six other towns in Chiapas, demanding autonomy and respect for the area’s indigenous population. The government responded first with military force, then with a diplomatic offensive that led to the San Andrés accords in 1996, a series of promises to honor indigenous rights and culture that the government has backpedaled away from ever since. The government also responded to the indigenous unrest, as the military document suggests, by arming and training indigenous factions and communities that remained loyal to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It was those paramilitaries who carried out the Acteal massacre.

Another element in the region’s history that set the stage for the killing was tension between Catholics and evangelicals, particularly Presbyterians–who were invited into the region 60 years ago by the president of Mexico, General Lázaro Cárdenas, as a way to undercut the power of the dominant Catholic Church. Although there are some Presbyterians who support the Zapatistas, many remain vehemently anti-Catholic and pro-PRI, easily integrated into the military’s strategy to undercut the influence of the Zapatistas and others who support indigenous self-determination.

“So the worms won’t get sick”

The Abejas–“the Bees”–are typical of the people the Presbyterians don’t like. A mostly Catholic group, sympathetic to the Zapatista cause but proudly nonviolent, the Bees were formed in 1992 by local residents who intervened in a family land conflict on the side of two sisters who had been denied land just because they were women. With guidance from a radical French priest, Michel Chanteau, who served the parish of Chenalhó, which includes the village of Acteal, the Bees developed an active Biblically-based nonviolence that supported efforts for justice and peace. The Bees refused to pay land taxes or obey the government until it honors the San Andrés accords. When they weren’t protesting or praying, the Bees grew organic coffee and produced honey. Chanteau and the Bees had long been critical of the PRI, and in response the PRI and the military provided guns and training and political support to their local allies, mostly Presbyterians, who harassed the Bees over land, a lucrative gravel pit, and control of the area’s deep green coffee fields.

The tension worsened after the emergence of the EZLN in 1994. Pro-Zapatista residents of Polhó, just north of Chenalhó, had declared themselves an “autonomous municipality.” The municipal president of Chenalhó, Jacinto Arias, a Presbyterian, worried about such independence catching on in his territory, and with the PRI and the military behind him started harassing the rebellious in his midst. He collected war taxes to stockpile more weapons. Those who paid the obligatory “taxes” had the PRI logo painted on their homes to guarantee that their dwelling wouldn’t be burned down. Faced with escalating violence, thousands of the Bees were forced to flee their homes–fruitlessly painted with the phrase “neutral zone”–for squatter settlements in nearby communities. In the months leading up to the massacre, more than two dozen people died in sniper attacks and confrontations between the PRI-Presbyterian paramilitaries and armed opponents, probably Zapatistas coming to the defense of their local sympathizers. President Ernesto Zedillo fanned the flames on October 1, 1997, stopping in San Cristóbal de las Casas to rage against the autonomous municipalities as “counties without law.” Arias, who met with Zedillo, swore in front of witnesses that he would kill Father Chanteau, then burn his body “so that the worms won’t get sick.”

A few days later, the Bees were attacked. Chanteau wasn’t present in Acteal that day, but it wouldn’t be long until he was grabbed by the military and deported. As the military prepared to put him on a plane at the Mexico City airport, a government imposter–pretending to be Chanteau–held a news conference where he confessed to having sponsored the violence.

Following the massacre, thousands of residents of Chenalhó and nearby towns, fearful of being slaughtered like the defenseless victims in Acteal, fled their homes and took refuge in squalid camps hastily constructed in more sympathetic areas. Publicly embarrassed by the massacre, the military tried to make the best of the situation, sending even more troops into Chiapas, rolling up to the refugee camps in their shiny U.S.-supplied trucks and personnel carriers, offering food and medical attention to the internally displaced families. Yet the refugees drove the soldiers away, shouting that they didn’t want food and medicine. They wanted justice.

The “Acteal incident”

It took a while, but given the international outcry provoked by the massacre, even the Mexican government had to respond. It had laid the foundation for the violence, but it got out of hand. So eventually more than 80 people were arrested and jailed in the state prison near Tuxtla Gutierrez, among them Jacinto Arias. Yet no serious attempt was made to identify and arrest what Latin Americans call the “intellectual authors”–the people behind the massacre. The prisoners were the poor, like always, and their imprisonment only exacerbated tensions in the highland villages.

With the Mexican political and justice systems obviously unable to resolve the continuing tension between victims and perpetrators, it was time to try something else. A handful of leaders from the two groups met together for prayerful discussion of the alternatives. There was some precedent for such ecumenical cooperation in Chenalhó; Presbyterians and Catholics there had worked together for nine years putting together a Tzotzil translation of the Bible. Although that cooperation ended with the massacre, local leaders on both sides knew they had to do something to break the escalating cycle of violence engulfing their villages.

They decided to take a look at the peacemaking experience of Christians in Nicaragua who had formed grassroots peace commissions during the war with the U.S.-backed Contras in the eighties. The peace commissions had brought together Catholics and evangelicals, Sandinistas and Contras during the eighties in a remarkable effort to build authentic peace. They had continued operating in the post-war nineties, resolving conflicts in local communities and at times functioning as a sort of local authority when the debt-plagued central government began to pull out of remote villages.

In July 2001, a delegation of Nicaraguan peace commission leaders came to Chiapas to explain their history. Two months later, a group of Bees and Presbyterians traveled to Nicaragua for two weeks to see for themselves. The idea was that Chiapas Christians could adapt the Nicaraguan experience to their own reality, setting up local peace commissions that would work to build the foundations for peace and justice.

Yet reconciliation in Chiapas has proved elusive, and at the beginning of 2002 the program had yet to really get off the ground. Participants from both sides blamed the other for blocking progress toward reconciliation.

“In Nicaragua they had a long war, and yet when that war was over they forgave each other. Without forgiveness, there can be no peace. Chiapas needs forgiveness in order to have peace,” Augustín Cruz told me. A Presbyterian pastor, he’s one of three Presbyterians who went to Nicaragua to examine the experience of the peace commissions there.

Cruz is also a cousin of Jacinto Arias, and understands forgiveness to mean the release of the imprisoned Presbyterians. “Many of those in prison are innocent,” he told me. I asked him if some of them were guilty. “I don’t know,” he said. What about the intellectual authors? “I don’t know,” he responded again, then hastened to add: “What happened in Acteal was just self-defense, people defending their communities against the Zapatistas.”

Cruz lives in the nearby village of Puebla, a town where no Bees nor Zapatistas can be found. They all live down the road in a squatters’ encampment. Cruz, who talks about the PRI and the Presbyterian Church in a way that almost blends the two, was one of those who drove them violently out of the village. “There are no Zapatistas here, only evangelicals,” Cruz insisted. “We want nothing to do with the Zapatistas for we are only interested in eternal life.”

The Zapatistas were the ones “who started the problems,” Cruz explained while sitting in front of his house, one of the largest in the village. “The Zapatistas want the poor to have better lives, to have cars, to be against the rich. We don’t agree. I worked for my house. No one should give you a house.”

Al Schreuder, a Reformed Church in America missionary from the United States who advises the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico in the reconciliation effort, admited that some of the Presbyterians “want to jump too fast to peace,” without dealing completely with what he disingenuously refers to as the “Acteal incident.” Yet Schreuder also said the Bees are dragging their heels on forgiveness because if peace were to come to Chiapas, “the Bees would lose the support of the Catholic Church and the non-governmental organizations.”

Schreuder demanded the release of the imprisoned community members, arguing that at most 15-20 people were involved in the mass killing. He told me that most versions of the massacre are untrue, as the telling “has become apocryphal, mixing together legend and myth.” And he complained that the justice system has not paid equal attention to the 18 Presbyterians who he said were killed in the weeks leading up to the events of December 22, 1997. “What of those 18 dead? They are the forgotten ones. The whole world only wants to talk about the 45 who died in Acteal.”

“With a massacre, it’s not easy to forgive”

On the other side of the conflict, I spoke with people like José Perez. He’s coordinator of the Catholic catechists in Acteal and one of the founders of the Bees. He traveled in Nicaragua with Cruz and Schreuder, and came home eager to make peace.

“Like the Nicaraguans, we’ve lived through a war, but our conflict has been a war of low-intensity. In Nicaragua the Christians came together and united around the cause of peace, but here, as part of that low-intensity conflict, people have been manipulated from the outside, people who don’t understand their own history have been manipulated by the government. The government established and funded the paramilitaries. So you can’t really call this a conflict among neighbors, because it was initiated from outside the community,” Perez said.

“They claim we are Zapatistas, but we’re not. We formed the Bees well before the Zapatista uprising. We are Christians, Catholics, and we read the Bible together. That’s where we discern our path. The Zapatistas often have the same proposals as we do, but our ways of struggling are different. They have weapons. We have the Bible and dialogue. Samuel [Ruiz, the former bishop] has said clearly that we cannot walk down two different paths at the same time,” Perez stated.

The Catholic activist told me the Bees want to live in peace with their neighbors, but claimed that reconciliation is made difficult by the Presbyterians’ closeness to the PRI, which although it recently lost both the presidential and Chiapas governor’s elections, remains firmly entrenched among the local elite and within the military. For Perez as for many in Mexico, “the government” remains the PRI.

“The Presbyterians are very close to the government. They get support from the government. They want to be in charge here. They store guns in their churches. They prayed in their churches after the massacre. That’s sad,” said Perez. “The poor Presbyterians are confused. They think we want vengeance and are going to take it out on them with weapons. But we don’t want vengeance. We simply want a better life. We want peace with justice. They talk about forgiveness. There can be forgiveness easily if it’s a simple crime, like when someone robs your cow. If they recognize their error and pay you back, you can forgive them. But with a massacre it’s not easy to forgive. The word of God says peace comes when there is justice. They want us to forgive them. But how can we forgive them if they won’t recognize that they’ve done anything wrong? And how can we forgive them when they still have all the guns?”

Perez laughs when I ask him about the claim that the Bees are responsible for the death of 18 Presbyterians. “We didn’t kill them. They died fighting against the Zapatistas in the mountains. We’re not responsible,” he said. “And the comparison isn’t fair. Their dead died with guns in their hands in the mountains. It’s not the same as our people who died while praying in the chapel.”

Indians get in the way

With one side demanding peace with forgiveness, and the other clamoring for peace with justice, it’s difficult to find enough common ground upon which to build a process of reconciliation. Yet area church leaders nonetheless believe it’s possible. “Like any family, the indigenous communities have internal conflicts, but they have ways of working those out,” said Gustavo Andrade, the vicar general of the San Cristóbal de las Casas diocese. The problem, he reported, is the pressure exerted from the outside. “The federal government has exacerbated these conflicts in Chiapas with its low-intensity war here. As long as the government continues to finance the paramilitaries and give money to just one side of the conflict, it provokes terrorism.”

Pedro Arriago, the Jesuit priest who took Michel Chanteau’s place, told me that dialogue in the violence-plagued indigenous communities will remain difficult as long as the government doesn’t change its policies. “The municipality of Chenalhó is right on the border between Zapatista-controlled villages to the north and an area of greater government control to the south,” Arriago said. “The government formed the paramilitaries as a buffer against the rebels. They took some local delinquents, gave them money from the PRI and training from the military, and turned them into today’s version of the Guardias Blancas”–the “White Guards,” death squads once set up by the large plantation owners to keep their slaves terrified and compliant.

Arriago said that while the paramilitaries pressured from one side, the Zapatistas pushed from the other. The Bees, he said, resisted in their own nonviolent way. When the PRI- and Presbyterian-aligned paramilitaries, who’d been taking a drubbing at the hands of the Zapatistas, decided to get even in a big way, they attacked the defenseless Bees.

Arriago said the men imprisoned for the massacre are guilty, “but they’re the less guilty ones. The people behind the decision to kill the Bees are not in jail.”

They may not even be in Chiapas.

Arriago argues that behind the violence in Chiapas is a decision by the Mexican elite to integrate their country’s southernmost state into the modern economic development of Mexico. “Yet the indigenous get in the way of that. They plant corn where others want to build maquiladoras or drill for oil. So you have to militarize the zone in order for their economic plans to go forward. What’s the logical result of this? Extermination. Historically, the economic dreams of the wealthy have excluded the poor majority. And so they’ve had to kill them off with epidemics, with hunger. Today, in Chiapas, they’re getting rid of them by getting them to kill each other.”