published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 1998
On Monday, December 22, I was traveling in Chiapas, a mountainous state in southern Mexico that borders Guatemala. My excursion that morning ended in San AndrÉs Larrainzar, some 20 miles northwest of San CristÓbal de las Casas.
The village, once the site of the peace talks with the Zapatista rebel group, was a shadow of its former self. At noon the market in the main square was not merely empty; the wooden stalls were closed and locked. No one could be seen in the dirty streets. The walls were marred with pro- and anti-Zapatista graffiti. All was quiet. And despite the majestic view of the surrounding mountains to the south and the valleys to the north, an ominous air hung over the village.
At that exact moment a bloody massacre was taking place not 15 miles away, in Acteal. The victims-45 Tzotzil Indians-had been living in a makeshift refugee camp on the roadside. Built on steep terrain, the camp was about 600 feet from the school and community center of Acteal, a village some 20 miles north of San CristÓbal de las Casas.
Several weeks before the massacre, the victims had fled nearby ChenalhÓ in an effort to escape the violence perpetrated there by one of the government-oriented paramilitary groups now active in the Los Altos region. Most of the refugees belonged to the Sociedad Civil Las Abejas (the "Civil Society of the Bees"), which has close ties to the Diocese of San CristÓbal de las Casas. In spite of its strong sympathies for the Zapatista National Liberation Army (ezln), Las Abejas is well known for its strong commitment to non-violence.
The refugee camp was new, with wooden shacks on two embankments about 50 feet below road level. An improvised wooden house on the lower embankment served as a church. But at 11 a.m. on the morning of December 22, most of the inhabitants were praying in an open space on the upper embankment. At 11:30, the camp was surrounded on three sides by approximately 60 armed gunmen, most carrying ak-47s, their faces partially concealed by bandannas. The attack started from below the lower embankment, with the first shots fired at the makeshift church.
In the commotion that followed, men, women, and children tried to escape. Some stumbled down into the ravine through thick foliage. Three men hid in a small crevasse. A large group huddled together against a furrow on one side of the embankment, with nowhere to go. The killers had time to position themselves and fire at will.
When the last volley ended, 45 people were dead or dying. The inhabitants of Acteal could hear their screams as the murderers closed in with machetes to finish the wounded and mutilate the dead. A few children, concealed beneath the corpses of their parents and relatives, survived. Some of the survivors had wounds caused by bullets that had been doctored to explode on impact.
With the camp emptied, the gunmen looted every shack, shooting into the air as they went. This process continued until 4:30, when they drove away in their pickup trucks.
The shooting could be heard in PolhÓ, Chimix, and Majomut, all villages within a few miles of Acteal. A police transport stationed on the road between PolhÓ and Acteal heard the dense and prolonged firing, but failed to investigate.
In the afternoon, reports of the shooting reached Father Gonzalo Ituarte of the National Commission for Mediation in San CristÓbal. He immediately contacted Chiapas's secretary of government, a man named Tovilla. "Everything is under control," he was told. "There was some shooting there, but we have agents in Acteal right now and everything is okay."
This deception was to be followed by others, as reported later by the National Human Rights Commission. In the first cover-up, state authorities tried to alter the scene of the shooting, removing the corpses before Justice Department officials arrived. They piled the bodies in a truck and drove them to Tuxtla GutiÉrrez, the capital of Chiapas. (The bodies were later returned to Acteal, where they now rest.)
But when the first of the wounded reached San CristÓbal in the early hours of December 23, the magnitude of the massacre was revealed. Acteal became a synonym for infamy.
In the aftermath, the attorney general declared that the deaths at Acteal had been the result of a family conflict, or perhaps of community strife. The attorney general's statement was then used to justify the military buildup that followed.
Those killed at Acteal were the latest victims in a conflict that began in January 1994 with the appearance in Chiapas of the Zapatista rebels. After a brief period of hostilities, the government of Carlos Salinas appointed a peace commissioner, and negotiations to end the conflict began. The first round of talks was concluded in March 1994 with a series of loosely defined agreements.
However, the ezln had reserved the right to consult with its supporters on the substance of the agreements, which most observers felt did not address the main causes of the rebellion. Most saw the agreements as an attempt by the Mexican government to maintain the status quo while buying time. The end product was rejected by the vast majority of Zapatista supporters.
The impasse that followed lasted until December 1994, when a major non-violent mobilization of the Zapatista rebels demonstrated the wide degree of support their movement had obtained in the state of Chiapas. With the support of a broad network of communities, the ezln was able to break out of its encirclement by the Mexican military without firing a single bullet.
Also in December 1994, Ernesto Zedillo succeeded Carlos Salinas as president of Mexico and, following the advice of hardliners in the government, launched a large-scale military offensive against the ezln in February 1995. However, the response to that offensive was so negative at home and abroad that the government eventually agreed to a new round of negotiations.
The ground rules for this set of negotiations took months to define, and the talks resumed in late 1995. The legal framework, the "Law for Peace in Chiapas," recognized the ezln as a "non-conformist group" and tacitly acknowledged that just causes led to the uprising. That law, still in force today, was supposed to suspend all penal procedures and military operations against the ezln. Further, the law mandates the implementation of confidence-building measures to facilitate the advancement of the peace dialogues.
The new talks included one session on the rights of indigenous peoples, a second on justice and democracy, and a third on economic development. The first session ended with the signing of the Agreements of San AndrÉs. Indigenous organizations from all over Mexico (including many that had been invited as advisers by the federal government) exerted pressure to obtain the government's signature on the agreement, which granted indigenous peoples the right to autonomous governance of their communities, within the overarching framework of Mexico's Constitution.
In March 1996, the second session opened with the active participation of many advisers-including the author-who had been invited to participate by the Zapatistas. However, unhappy with the outcome of the first session, the government had by this time decided to sabotage the peace process (see "Trashing the 'Law for Peace,'" page 25). As a result, the ezln decided in August to suspend the talks, declaring that it would not return to the negotiating table unless the government took steps to comply with the agreements that had already been reached; unless it ended the expansion of the military presence in Chiapas as mandated by the Law for Peace in Chiapas; and unless it fully empowered its negotiating team to conclude substantive matters.
This is where the story begins to link directly to Acteal. In August 1996, the government began implementing a counterinsurgency strategy, probably designed by the Center for Research on National Security (cisen), a federal political intelligence agency.
The regional expression of the government's strategy is the State Security Council, an agency that analyzes rural conflicts and social movements to help channel social investments and development resources to sympathizers. Following a cisen-designed plan, the State Security Council created municipal security councils in Chiapas which were supposed to facilitate information exchanges and coordinate relief efforts in case of natural disasters. In reality, these councils have been used to distribute resources and money for weapons, and to identify possible recruits from among the young landless rural laborers to build up local paramilitaries sympathetic to the aims of the national government.
Tracing the exact origin of the weapons used by the paramilitaries is extremely difficult because of the complex chain of intermediaries used to distribute them. Despite this, evidence in the form of testimonies and written requests demonstrates official involvement. This writer has obtained copies of various requests for money, weapons, and communications equipment addressed to the municipal authorities of Tila, a town in northern Chiapas, from the local pri-dominated council in San Francisco Jimbal.
No matter the exact route used to distribute the weapons, the outcome of the government's counterinsurgency strategy has been the appearance of armed paramilitary groups throughout the Los Altos region of Chiapas. Acteal was the inevitable result of the creation and arming of these paramilitaries.
Professional politicians seem incapable of understanding the origin or nature of the Zapatista uprising. Misery and destitution, the marginal existence and the daily presence of death, corruption and injustice, deterioration of state institutions-all of these help explain the genesis of the revolt in Chiapas. Yet at the highest levels of the Mexican government there is an inability to comprehend.
Acteal was the predictable result of the Zedillo government's counterinsurgency approach to this situation. There are three closely interrelated components in this approach. The first rests on a strong military presence in Chiapas in order to neutralize and, if possible, destroy the ezln. The second consists of a faÁade of being actively engaged in a peace process. The third element is the growing set of paramilitary groups that are the backbone of the counterinsurgency war in the North and Los Altos regions of Chiapas.
With governmental encouragement, the paramilitary groups multiplied rapidly. The first two-Paz y Justicia and Los Chinchulines-appeared in northern Chiapas in 1995, operating from the communities of Tila, Tumbal, and Sabanilla. In 1996 and 1997, other groups emerged-the Tom·s Munster, the Movimiento IndÌgena Revolucionario Anti-Zapatista, the M·scara Roja, the Fuerzas Armadas del Pueblo, among others. The exact number is difficult to determine, but in the county of ChenalhÓ alone, anthropologists AndrÉ Aubry and AngÉlica Inda recently found 255 armed members of paramilitaries in nine localities. The most important of the groups, based in the hamlet Los Chorros, was the main source of the gunmen who attacked the refugees in Acteal.
Typically, these groups were organized and supported by local members of Mexico's ruling party, the pri (the Partido Revolucionario Institucional). Their methods included outright theft, the levying of "special taxes" to purchase weapons, and the firing of their weapons just over the rooftops of the houses of those who failed to comply with their demands. If families fled, their frail wooden houses were looted and then burned to the ground. If people remained but refused to "cooperate," they were often kidnapped or killed. In many cases, the paramilitaries used the proceeds from the sale of looted goods to buy more weapons.
The paramilitary groups have taken a heavy toll. No one has an exact figure for the casualties in this war of attrition, but a conservative estimate would be 1,500 dead in the two years leading up to the massacre in Acteal. The number of villages and hamlets in which the paramilitaries operated has not been counted, but the National Mediation Commission (conai) has evidence that more than 60 communities have been subjected to harassment, thefts, shootings, and burnings.
According to conai, by December 1997 the number of refugees in the northern part of Chiapas was 6,120; in the area of ChenalhÓ (the central part of Los Altos), the figure was 9,207, or almost 30 percent of the total population of that county. The numbers have increased since the killings at Acteal.
Most of the refugees in the North are prd (Partido de la RevoluciÓn Democratica) sympathizers, while the majority of those in Los Altos are sympathizers or supporters of the Zapatistas. Some refugees are even supporters of the pri who have refused to pay the paramilitaries' special taxes. This group includes 300 people from Los Chorros and Canolal, who are now refugees in San CristÓbal.
The refugees cannot safely return to their communities to rebuild their homes as long as the paramilitary groups operate. Conditions in the camps are desperate. The refugees have little food or medical assistance, and their camps are in the bitter cold of the highlands-some are located 7,600 feet above sea level, in an area that has the heaviest rainfall in all of Mexico. Infant mortality, a chronic problem in Chiapas, must be extremely high in the camps. On a tape recording I made of interviews with refugees in a camp near PolhÓ, the voices of the refugees, eager to tell their stories, were drowned out by the coughing of the children.
Why Acteal and ChenalhÓ? Why didn't the paramilitary groups emerge in the nearby Canyons region, where the Zapatistas have strong social support? Anthropologists Aubry and Inda believe there are two critical elements in understanding the appearance of the paramilitary groups.
The first is electoral logic: The paramilitary groups became active in the North and in Los Altos, where there were 18 municipalities in which the prd had harvested good returns in the last elections. The paramilitaries were organized, in part, to help skew elections through intimidation. In contrast, the paramilitaries were not active in the Canyons, because there were fewer municipalities and thus fewer elections to be lost.
The second element was the ready supply of landless and unemployed young men. In just a few days, a lonely lad with no prospects for education or a decent job could become "someone" just by joining a paramilitary group. He could carry a weapon and everyone would "respect" him. A little training-more to build esprit de corps than to develop weapons expertise-and he would be ready for action.
How did Acteal fit into this strategy? And why were the non-violent Las Abejas attacked? Aside from electoral considerations, one possible reason was to deliver a message-there would be no neutrality in the war against the Zapatistas. All neutrals would be regarded as enemies. This message of terror still reverberates throughout the North and Los Altos, despite the government's recent public relations blitz designed to calm fears.
Las Abejas is devoted to non-violence, and it is particularly close to Bishop Samuel RuÌz, who heads the Mediation Commission. By attacking Las Abejas, party chiefs and caciques (rural bosses traditionally linked with the ruling party) are also attempting to undermine by terror the popular support enjoyed by the bishop and weaken his role as mediator.
The killers could have chosen to attack the community of Acteal proper, where some refugees from Zapatista communities were temporarily located. But they chose the refugee camp instead. This does not mean, however, that there won't be any paramilitary attacks against Zapatista-allied communities in the near future. This could be the next stage, but it would require tactical changes and perhaps the appearance of death squads--the next step toward an inexorable escalation of violence. This stage, which would lead to the selective elimination of ezln leaders and key advisers, must be prevented at all costs or it will contaminate beyond hope any chance for a rapid solution to the conflict.
In late January, the federal government launched an ambiguous initiative nominally designed to defuse the crisis in Chiapas. A central point of the initiative was a pledge to use the army to disarm "clandestine or illegal groups"-that is, the paramilitaries. As the Bulletin went to press, it still remained unclear whether this also meant the Zapatistas.
According to the Law for Peace in Chiapas, the government must disarm the paramilitaries, regardless of the new initiative. One hopes that the army will actually play a positive role in creating favorable conditions for continued negotiations by taking weapons away from these criminal gangs. But the government has issued many comforting statements in recent months and years regarding the conflict in Chiapas without following through.
In fact, a close reading of the pledge suggests that the only weapons the army will take away from the paramilitary groups will be army-issue machine guns and explosives. The paramilitaries will continue to possess rifles, pistols, shotguns, machetes, and other tools of mayhem and intimidation.
After all, the paramilitaries are largely creatures of the federal government-and of the army. Any lingering doubt about the paramilitaries' role in the defense ministry's counterinsurgency strategy vanished in January with the disclosure of "Chiapas '94," a defense ministry document disclosed by Proceso, a Mexican newsweekly. The authenticity of the document has not been denied by the military.
The document discusses, as one line of action, the "secret organization of certain sectors of the population, among which ranchers, small private landowners, and individuals characterized by their high sense of patriotism . . . will be employed under army orders in support of army operations." It outlined plans for training "self-defense groups" and paramilitary organizations, describing them as the backbone of military and "development" operations. It also included instructions on how to create self-defense groups where they do not exist.
In claiming the authority to organize these groups, the Mexican military went well beyond its constitutional limits, and no one was to blame more than the head of the armed forces, President Zedillo himself.
Forced to respond after the Acteal killings, the federal government insisted that all responsibility for the creation and training of the paramilitary groups resided with state police and security officials. But it is impossible to believe that the Mexican army was not involved. That the paramilitaries carry military-issue weapons-the very weapons that the army is now supposed to round up-is one indication that regular army units have been involved with these groups all along.
Further, to ascribe the creation of the paramilitaries to the state government was disingenuous at best. Political institutions in Chiapas are in dismal disarray, and the state is for all practical purposes under federal control. Since the conflict started in 1994, six provisional, substitute, or interim governors have been paraded through the governor's palace in Chiapas. Under these circumstances, it is impossible to think that the army, probably the best organized structure in Chiapas, with 45,000-60,000 troops now stationed there, could be ignorant of what had been going on.
In fact, the operations of paramilitary groups in northern Chiapas and Los Altos have reflected the federal government's two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, the paramilitaries' covert actions relieved the army of the shameful task of terrorizing civilian populations. On the other, the regular army remained available for use against Zapatista strongholds (after Acteal, 3,000 fresh troops were flown in from neighboring Yucat·n and Campeche).
It is inconceivable that Commander-in-Chief Zedillo was ignorant of the rise of the paramilitary groups. He has visited Chiapas on at least eight different occasions since taking power in December 1994, and he has been repeatedly alerted about the rising paramilitary groups.
Now his government says it will disarm the paramilitaries. That remains to be seen, of course. Unwilling to implement the signed peace accord, unable to follow through on its word, the government's credibility is close to zero.
In the immediate aftermath of the killings, a few people at the bottom of the chain of command in ChenalhÓ were fired.
Later, the governor of Chiapas and his staff resigned. A substitute governor-number six since the conflict started-was hastily put in place. At the federal level, the president asked for the resignation of the interior secretary and nominated a new representative to the peace talks. As Gilberto LÓpez y Rivas, spokesman for the Congressional Commission on Concordance and Pacification, put it, "Mr. Zedillo has fired everyone he could. The next in the chain of command to be changed is the president himself."
In fact, Zedillo has yet to fire his defense secretary, but the point is that many believe that the list of personnel changes has merely served to appease domestic and foreign critics rather than to signal a fundamental change in direction. Mac McLarty, President Bill Clinton's envoy, said in early January that Clinton was satisfied with the prompt action taken by Zedillo. The move was less successful with the European Parliament, however, which warned that sanctions against Mexico might be invoked in the future.
Similarly, the actions of Mexico's Justice Department appear to be limited to making scapegoats of low-level officials while those in the higher echelons of government escape unscathed. With the responsibility of federal authorities in the organization and arming of paramilitary groups now established, Zedillo has sent the wrong kind of message to the nation by forcing the resignation of his interior secretary instead of arraigning him on charges related to the crimes of the paramilitary groups.
The cabinet changes are not likely to alter the government's strategy. Before and after Acteal, the army continued to harass the ezln, principally by searching and sometimes ransacking homes in towns and villages known to be sympathetic to the Zapatistas, while leaving areas controlled by the paramilitaries alone. All of this was in clear violation of the Law for Peace in Chiapas.
The army's presence and behavior in Chiapas is also a clear violation of the Mexican Constitution. According to articles 29 and 129, any military interference in a state must be preceded by a congressional declaration of emergency powers. The army is explicitly forbidden by the Constitution from carrying out ordinary police functions.
The defense secretary has argued that the army was simply enforcing a federal law on firearms, but that law does not authorize the army to enter communities and homes to make warrantless searches, and it does not give the army the right to establish military checkpoints on civilian roads or to establish permanent bases in and around Zapatista communities. The Law for Peace in Chiapas also prohibits these maneuvers.
The government has been unable to solve this conflict, which first came to world attention on January 1, 1994. Over the past four years the conflict has grown larger, not smaller. It has also become much more difficult to disentangle.
Precious time has been lost with a long sequence of mediocre government negotiators who worried mostly about their own personal and political agendas while the conflict slid out of control. The main objective in all the negotiations was to disarm the Zapatistas, not to deal with what caused their appearance in the first place.
Within two months of coming to power, Zedillo opted for a course proposed by hardliners, and he launched a large-scale military and police offensive in Chiapas. He has continued to say that the peace dialogue is the only way to go, but the deliberate sabotage of the peace talks, the actions of the army and security forces, and more recently the government's covert support of the paramilitaries, are constant reminders of Mr. Zedillo's initial preference for a military solution.
Today it seems unlikely that the negotiations will resume soon. And it is almost unthinkable that they will resume in their old format, under the Law for Peace in Chiapas. The government realized in late 1995 that the law was an obstacle to its military options, and it may have decided then that the dialogues in San AndrÉs had to come to a standstill.
By overtly violating the Law for Peace in Chiapas with an extraordinary military buildup and by taking actions against Zapatista communities, the government tried to obliterate whatever remained of the legal framework for the negotiations. This was a dangerous gamble. Not only was this a clear provocation against the Zapatistas, it also undermined the independence of the legislative branch of power.
The notion that the Zapatistas can be easily destroyed-a popular idea with both civilian and military hardliners-is erroneous. A rapid surgical operation to capture or kill the Zapatista leadership is, of course, quite possible. But it would not put an end to the war.
It is true that the military strength of the ezln is small compared to the army, and there are few places to hide. But official data show that the population of the areas that strongly support the Zapatistas exceeds 1.3 million people. Perhaps 30 percent of this total (400,000 people), are serious adherents. Their geographical distribution alone should be enough to reveal the folly of believing that a military venture would "solve" the conflict.
Within the political space in which the conflict is developing, there are other problems. The ezln demonstrated in 1997 that it enjoys widespread popular support-31 counties have what are known in Chiapas as "autonomous councils," which are a duplication of the governing political and administrative units in those areas. The councils are a popular response to the corruption and inefficiency of the pri's local authorities.
The councils are also an intelligent political rejoinder to Zedillo's thoughtless backtracking on the agreements of San AndrÉs. In the process, ezln influence has been extended in the North, in Los Altos, in the southern Sierra Madre (Motozintla, near the border with Guatemala), the Soconusco region, and in two important corn-producing regions, Venustiano Carranza and La Fraylesca. If the government's war on the Zapatistas was designed to deny the rebels political maneuverability, it has been a resounding failure.
Everything indicates the Zedillo administration has been obsessed by the idea of "winning" a war by decapitating the enemy, as if the indigenous peoples in Chiapas would return meekly to the passive role widely attributed to them by racism and ignorance of Chiapas history.
Time is running out in Mexico. The war of counterinsurgency in Chiapas has failed and the massacre shows how irritated and frustrated the political and military establishment is with the current situation. In their desperation, the hardliners will try anything.
The government's initiative in late January promised much: Disarming the paramilitaries, at least to a degree. Completing the official investigation of the massacre. Restructuring the police forces in Chiapas. Improving the administration of justice in Chiapas. And eliminating all "non-authorized taxes," a measure presumably directed at the paramilitaries.
Some of the specific actions sounded good, too, particularly a pledge to "discuss the relocation of army units" in Chiapas, and the promise of humanitarian aid to refugees and to help them return to their communities.
But other proposed actions sounded cynical and mischievous, particularly a promise to "eliminate duplication" in municipal government functions. That expressed a clear intent to go after the autonomous councils, which are central to the Zapatista movement.
Two fundamental problems also cast doubt on the government's initiative: First, the government's principal objections to the San AndrÉs accords still stand, particularly the agreement on indigenous autonomy. This is tantamount to continued rejection of the already signed accords. Second, in the announcement of the initiative no reference was made to the Law for Peace in Chiapas; in other words, the government's new initiative ignores the fact that there is already a legal framework in place for the negotiations.
At the end of January, hardly anything about the government's peace initiative was clear. It may lead to something positive. Or it may be little more than a public relations ploy by the spinmeisters in Mexico City.
So far, President Zedillo's discourse regarding Chiapas brims with contradictions. He does not yet appear to have a strategy for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. In addition, the economic crisis that was revealed as Zedillo began his term has not been resolved. Indeed, recent drops in oil prices have worsened it. Zedillo cannot buy much more time and he does not have a lot of leeway.
The way in which attempts to solve the conflict in Chiapas unfold are of historic importance to Mexico. If a military solution is ultimately imposed, the military will gain greater power and autonomy throughout Mexico, and whatever remains of the rule of law will vanish. In spite of the 1997 elections, the country's transition to democracy will be aborted.
If, on the other hand, a just and viable solution can be attained through a rational negotiating process, then the transition to the democracy that Mexico needs could become a reality.
Alejandro Nadal is a professor of economics at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and is a member of the Bulletin's Board of Directors. In 1996, he served as an economic adviser to the Zapatista negotiating team.
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