European Fact-Finding Team Gathers to Tour Chiapas

A European fact-finding team pledged Sunday to be fair during its investigation of violence in Indian communities in southern Mexico.

About 170 human rights activists and politicians are to begin their tour this week in Chiapas state, where 45 Indian villagers were slaughtered in a Dec. 22 massacre.

International attention focused here after the December massacre, in which unarmed supporters of leftist Zapatista rebels were massacred by gunmen allegedly connected to local officials and Mexico’s ruling party.

The Zapatista National Liberation Army rose up briefly in January 1994, and trouble has simmered ever since.

Also on Sunday, International Red Cross workers discovered the bodies of seven men in a cave in Chiapas, and residents blamed the same group that has been linked to the December massacre.

Relatives of the victims found Sunday had pressed authorities to find the men, who had been missing since October.

Rescue workers rappelled into a 130-foot vertical cave near the village of Petpejel, 70 miles southeast of San Cristobal de las Casas, to retrieve the bodies. The seven apparently had been thrown into the pit after being shot in a dispute between peasants in the nearby village of El Vergel in October.

Meanwhile, a Chiapas state police commander being investigated for a possible role in the December massacre said top state officials could have prevented the killings.

“Officials of the highest rank, the governor and state interior minister, did have knowledge that this was going on,” Roberto Garcias Rivas told the newspaper Reforma.

The governor and a dozen of his top officials resigned in the wake of the slayings.