Massacre Suspects Arrested

Authorities said Sunday that they had arrested 16 suspects in the Friday night massacre of 26 peasants, victims of a bitter land dispute between rival villages in mountainous southern Oaxaca state.

The slain, all men from the municipality of Santiago Xochiltepec, were killed in an ambush as they returned home from their logging and sawmill jobs in the Sierra Sur mountains about 300 miles southeast of Mexico City.

Six survivors gave investigators descriptions that led to the arrests.

The Oaxaca state attorney general’s office said the 16 suspects were arrested in Santo Domingo de Teojomulco. In March, that village lost a decision before a federal agrarian reform tribunal to Santiago Xochiltepec, a largely Zapotec indigenous community with about 1,000 residents.

“This attack was an act of vengeance of one community toward another,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement. “This problem has its origin in the extreme poverty and marginalization in which hundreds of Oaxaca communities live.”

The tribunal gave Santiago Xochiltepec improved rights to a disputed 20,000-acre spread of valuable timberland and cornfields, said Eric Heras of the attorney general’s office in the capital city, which is also called Oaxaca.

Two weeks after the March decision, residents of Santiago Xochiltepec were reportedly fired on by members of the losing settlement.

“The arguments are usually over boundary lines. They can be hard to determine in the mountains,” Heras said.

Various indigenous communities have been feuding over land in the region for centuries. More than 200 state and federal agents were sent to investigate Friday’s killings.

In addition to the arrests, police and army units seized 24 firearms, including AK-47s and shotguns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. The suspects were all jailed in the state capital. Tension remained high in the area, and army units as well as federal and state police continued to patrol the zone.

The victims were shot as they packed into the back of a truck. They had just been paid at their jobs at sawmills in San Pedro el Alto and were on their way home for the weekend when shooting erupted in a settlement called Agua Fria.

The killers fired down on the truck from an adjoining ridge after the driver, Alberto Antonio Perez, had been stopped and allowed to flee. The killers then stripped the bodies of cash and valuables.

Perez is cooperating in the investigation.

There have been several bloody clashes in mountain areas over rights to forests, which provide a coveted source of income to the indigenous poor.

Land disputes are common throughout Mexico, and literally thousands of cases remain open before various federal tribunals.