Jan-Albert Hootsen: Militias Return to Stalk the Killing Fields of Chiapas Jan-Albert Hootsen - Vocativ
go to original January 23, 2014

Acteal: Ten Years of Impunity - A documentary that tells the truth about the crime of state that occured in December 22, 1997 in the tsotsil community of Acteal, as part of the strategy followed by the mexican government against the organized communities of Chiapas. (Koman Ilel)

ACTEAL, Mexico — There is no escaping the past here in this remote village in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. It hangs in the air like a terrible fog. It’s etched in stone in a small concrete area lined with crosses: a tomb for dozens of people who were murdered by a local militia some 16 years ago. The event, known as the Acteal Massacre, was among the most gruesome in modern Mexican history. The dead included pregnant women, their unborn babies ripped straight from their wombs.

Máscara Roja, the group involved in the killings, was one of many militias that the Mexican government at least tacitly supported in Chiapas during the 1990s. The goal: to combat a leftist uprising by the Zapatistas, an armed group fighting for autonomy and indigenous rights in Mexico’s poorest region. Some two decades ago, the militias committed a campaign of murder, rape and terror across the state. In the 2000s, their presence waned as the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), which long dominated Mexico, fell from power.

Now, however, the PRI is back. And the militias are, too, reportedly beating, threatening and displacing indigenous people across Chiapas - all allegedly with a wink and a nod from Governor Manuel Velasco, a prominent member of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s party. The government denies any involvement with the militias, but local human rights workers say otherwise. “There is a very clear climate of impunity,” says Victor Hugo López Rodriguez, the director of the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center in San Cristobal de las Casas, a major regional city in Chiapas.

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