Mexico Villagers Mount Vigil as Remains Are Examined

As government and rebel officials sought Friday to negotiate an agreement to resolve the tumult that recently erupted in this southern Mexican region, families in this troubled village hoped to find their own peace this weekend.

Since Thursday, three women--who believe that they have been made widows by the army--have kept vigil outside a health clinic, where strangers, inside, have been examining a hodgepodge of bones. The women contend that the bones are the remains of their husbands, whom they have not seen since Jan. 7, when soldiers allegedly tortured the men, then took them away.

Today, the remains are to be buried, although their positive identification must await results of sophisticated genetic tests at distant, urban laboratories.

The men’s disappearance, and the apparent summary executions of rebels and hospital patients in nearby Ocosingo, are just some of the human rights abuses allegedly committed by the army, when soldiers put down the rebels’ Jan. 1 uprising in the state of Chiapas. The cases are under Defense Ministry investigation.

The government-funded National Human Rights Commission on Tuesday said that there were 727 allegations of misdeeds during the rebel revolt; 76 of the accusations were made against the army. The panel has received 56 accusations involving murder, 80 of torture, 42 of illegal detentions and four aerial military attacks; 23 people, including the missing villagers, are still unaccounted for.

The commission, in keeping with its practices, is refraining from comment until the Defense Ministry publishes its investigation, Commissioner Jorge Madrazo said on a visit here Thursday.

But Mexicans are growing increasingly skeptical about the army investigations.

In the cases here, the Defense Ministry denied that soldiers had been in the village on Jan. 7, the day residents say troops came in and forced all men older than 12 to lie face down in the town square from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Severiano, Hermelindo and Sebastian Santiz--who are unrelated, despite their common last name--were taken to the church, where their heads were dunked in water; they were beaten and cut with knives, villagers said.

“The soldiers wanted them to confess to being (rebels), but we are not, so they refused,” said Humberto Santiz, 32, Sebastian’s son. “Or at least we weren’t. After what they have done to us, we are ready to take up arms now.”

The villagers accuse the army of driving the men away in a panel truck, which appeared to be an ambulance because it bore a prominent red cross.

But the Defense Ministry has concluded that the men could not have been taken by soldiers because, by officials’ reckoning, no troops were present that day.

Further, according to a Defense Ministry report, the bones that the villagers found on Feb. 10 were from four different individuals who had been dead at least eight months.

Humberto Santiz scoffed at that notion, asserting that the family had examined materials they believed to be his father’s. The family “recognized his watch, his dental plate, cloth from his shirt and pants--and we found a shoe,” he said.

Filled with distrust, villagers refused to allow another examination of the remains until Clyde Snow, a renowned forensic anthropologist, arrived here Thursday.

During an earlier trip to Mexico, Snow had reviewed photographs of five bodies, found lined up in the Ocosingo market.

He concluded that the individuals probably were executed. The human rights commission reviewed the case with him and agreed, contradicting an earlier government report that had exonerated the army.

Snow’s willingness to buck authorities in the earlier case impressed villagers here; they asked him to examine the bones they had rescued from vultures, five weeks after their neighbors had disappeared.

Snow was greeted with great enthusiasm and chose as his work site a two-room, brick health clinic that Severiano Santiz, one of the missing men, had built.

“He gave the land for the clinic, then he organized everyone to build it,” Carmelina Lopez said of her 60-year-old husband. “He was a brick mason and he loved community work.”

On Thursday, as Snow prepared the morgue, Lopez and the two other wives lit candles and followed the coffin carrying the bones from the church to the clinic. Snow sorted the bones; he fitted together skulls and found a dental plate among the remains that slipped perfectly onto one of them. That plate convinced Sebastian Santiz’s family that one set of bones were his: A recent photograph of balding Santiz shows him smiling slightly, displaying a row of perfect, false, front teeth.

Petrona Lopez has no doubts about why the army chose to torture her husband.

“He was the one who went to Mexico City and found out that the land next to us was federal land,” she said. Morelia, a semi-communal farm, had fought for more land, and, when Sebastian learned four years ago that the area next to the village--where a landowner had pastured cattle--belonged to the government, he laid claim to 400 acres for Morelia. He got them.

“My dad was a man who knew how to get things done,” recalled Humberto. “He got us water, electricity and a road. That is why he was elected commissioner for two different terms.”

Paulina Dominguez, a sweet-faced woman, was less certain about why she has been left to raise three children--the youngest age 8--alone.

“He liked to work in the field and to have a little drink at night,” she said of her husband, Hermelindo, 42. “I have loved him ever since we were children. I can feel that he no longer exists. I just want to finally bury him.”