Bishop Lashes Out as Mexico Buries 45 Slain

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 a champion of the rights of indigenous people in this impoverished region, also didn’t 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 when 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 a mourning process that Ruiz said plays 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.

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 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 evangelical Protestants.

PRI officials have noted that 15 to 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 Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar to take over the investigation of Monday’s massacre and declared that the perpetrators will be prosecuted fully regardless of their political affiliation.

After the Indians marching toward the burial ceremonies on Thursday fell upon and accused some peasants--who were from a village nearby but were with local police--of having participated in the massacre, authorities held them, Associated Press reported; officials said 18 people have been detained, including the alleged leader of the gunmen who stormed the town.

Ruiz tried to offer some solace to the survivors in his Christmas sermon, saying: “The greatest event the world has ever known, the birth in our flesh of the word of God, took place in the painful framework of great suffering. The true light erupts in the middle of the most dense fog.”

But his sermon also emphasized what he called “the aggravating factors that make this painful event a true crime against humanity.”

He noted, for example, that the victims were unarmed and praying at the time of the attack and that most were women and children--who already had been displaced at least once by violence.

He lamented “the whole climate of increasing violence and impunity, which has been reported in detail to the authorities, so they could have stopped it before this shameful event.”