Prayers, Tears For Massacre Victims

Roman Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz sought Thursday to console the people of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas with a Christmas message that grappled with this week’s massacre of 45 unarmed villagers.

But the cleric, who is one of Mexico’s best-known religious figures and is a champion of the rights of indigenous people in this impoverished region, also did not disguise his anger over the relentless bloodshed in his diocese as he buried the dead.

“How much effort it costs us in this moment to say ‘Merry Christmas,”’ Ruiz said in his sermon Thursday. “To our human sensibility, it seems that the child (who represents peace) is stillborn.”

Ruiz, himself nearly a victim of the Chiapas violence during an ambush in November, offered Christmas Eve Mass in the crowded, handsome cathedral in the colonial city of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Then, on Christmas morning, he traveled to the settlement of Acteal to say Mass in the tiny wooden chapel where villagers were praying at midday Monday. That was where several dozen gunmen descended on the hamlet and then shot and hacked to death nine men, 21 women and 15 children, including a 2-month-old infant; more than two dozen people, many of whom remained hospitalized Thursday, were injured.

The victims’ bodies were brought back to the village on Christmas Eve to be prepared for burial, including with a mourning process that Ruiz said played a critical role in the culture of the Tzotzil Indians of the region.

With some scuffles breaking out between angry villagers and local authorities - accused by many here of participating, directly or indirectly in the killings - the Tzotzil Indians marched in a long procession before burying their dead.

A mile outside this southern Mexican town, at a curve on a mountainous two-lane road, the procession of hundreds of weeping marchers met two oncoming trucks Thursday: one filled with state police, the other with peasants from a nearby village.

The mourners grew enraged.

“That’s them. Those are the attackers,” one man yelled.

They pulled one peasant off the truck and began to kick him before the police leapt out and stopped them.

But the silent crowd surrounded the peasants, and the police decided to take them in for questioning, driving off in their flatbed truck toward San Cristobal, the biggest town in the highlands of Chiapas.

The procession continued on to Acteal, as many marchers returned to their homes for the first time since fleeing for their lives Monday. When the marchers reached the village, many burst into tears. Women hid their faces in their shawls.

There was singing and chanting, and tears flowed as Ruiz and the crowd prayed over the coffins, lined up in front of a makeshift altar of palm fronds and tree trunks.

The dead were then interred in mass graves.

The toll in this week’s massacre was the worst in Chiapas since Zapatista rebels launched an armed uprising on Jan. 1, 1994. At least 145 people were killed in that 12-day conflict before a cease-fire was reached. Negotiations broke down in September 1996, and skirmishing between government supporters and those sympathetic to the rebels has increased in recent months - though never with the ferocity of the pre-Christmas massacre.

Survivors described the attackers as supporters of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, whose seven-decade control of Mexico has begun to unravel - at the polls in local, state and congressional elections as well as in the conflict in Chiapas.

The victims were among a group of about 300 people who had formed a nonviolent civic group called “Las Abejas” (“The Bees”), which acknowledged support for the land-reform and autonomy demands of the rebels.

Most were refugees who said they had come to Acteal to escape conflict in the region, which residents said has escalated since July. The disputes vary from new political rivalries to old grudges over land and community resources to religious tensions between Catholics and the substantial evangelical Protestant movements.

PRI officials have noted that between 15 and 20 of their supporters have been killed this year in separate confrontations.

In all, more than 100 people are believed to have been killed in the sporadic clashes this year.

President Ernesto Zedillo has ordered Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar to take over the investigation and declared that the perpetrators will be prosecuted fully regardless of their political affiliation.

Zedillo has said the latest Chiapas killings should serve as a powerful incentive for both sides to get back to the negotiating table and find a peaceful solution.

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