Arms Cache Reportedly Found at Chiapas Site

Investigators uncovered a small cache of arms buried outside the home of a suspect in the massacre of 45 Mexican villagers, authorities announced Friday.

The two .22-caliber rifles, a shotgun, a revolver and ammunition “are similar to those used Dec. 22 in Acteal,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

The weapons were unearthed in the village of Quextic, less than half a mile from Acteal, where the group of mostly women and children was slain last week in an attack that shocked Mexico.

Witnesses said the attackers used weapons ranging from machetes to .22-caliber hunting guns and AK-47 assault rifles.

Using sniffer dogs and metal detectors, soldiers, police and judicial investigators searched Acteal on Friday but did not find any evidence, the statement said. It was not immediately clear when the weapons cache was discovered in Quextic.

The officials who slipped down the steep, muddy path into Acteal on Friday refused to give their names to a village leader and said only that they were looking for “evidence.”

Indian girls, washing their clothes, looked on as the police took photos and videotape of them and of reporters.

“We’re looking for some indications. Don’t be concerned,” the general leading the group told a village leader, Lorenzo Perez Arias.

The soldiers made a chalk outline around a creek bed where many women were killed and sent four dogs sniffing through the area.

Roman Catholic Church officials in the state of Chiapas and survivors of the slaughter have accused members of the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, of complicity.

PRI officials deny the charges, and the Interior Ministry vowed that “there will be impunity for nobody” in the investigation, which already has produced the arrest of two regional party officials and 44 other suspects.

Most of the alleged gunmen are PRI members. The victims were peasant sympathizers of the Zapatistas, a rebel group that rose up four years ago to protest what it called discrimination against the region’s poor Maya-descended peasants.

However, the attorney general’s office has characterized the Acteal massacre as stemming from family and inter-village feuding that dates back decades.

Many of Acteal’s villagers support the goals of the Zapatista National Liberation Army rebels but not their armed struggle.

After the massacre was discovered, many villagers fled Acteal. Four hundred have since returned, most of them in a New Year’s Eve march from the nearby town of Polho.