4 Mexican Officials, Civilian Slain in Shootout in Chiapas

Two state policemen, two municipal officials and a civilian were killed in a fierce gun battle Tuesday in Tres Cruces, Mexico, as police were attempting to catch suspects in a shooting that killed two civilians in the remote Chiapas state community Sunday, authorities said.

Police said they had detained two suspects, Candelario Heredia Hernandez and Enrique Hernandez Hernandez, and wounded a third man, Pascual Heredia Hernandez, who engaged them in a shootout with high-caliber weapons from several surrounding houses.

At a news conference Tuesday, Mariano Herran Salvatti, attorney general for Chiapas, said investigators had not determined the motive behind Sunday’s slayings. But some Mexico City and Chiapas newspapers linked the attacks to a long-running feud between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants among the indigenous Chiapans.

Herran, however, said all three suspects in the attacks were Catholic, as were all three civilians who were killed. And Herran carefully avoided attributing the killings to a specific cause.

“It is precisely these groups that want political power that hide themselves in situations or confrontations of a religious character,” he said.

On Tuesday, more than 100 state law enforcement officials descended on Tres Cruces, about nine miles from the tourist center of San Cristobal de las Casas, to search for suspects in Sunday’s attacks. One of those wounded Tuesday told the Mexico City newspaper Milenio that police had initiated the aggression by acting in a “violent manner.”

In recent weeks, a dispute with strong religious overtones has arisen over control of the local water supply. On Jan. 14, Jose Gomez Gomez, president of the municipality of San Juan Chamula, announced a plan to replace five local water wells that are regarded as sacred by the Tzotzile-speaking Catholics, whose beliefs mix ancient Maya spirituality with the traditional Roman Catholic liturgy.

Gomez has said he wants to construct a more modern and efficient regional water delivery system, a move that is supported by the evangelicals but is regarded by the Catholics as an act of aggression and a threat to their way of life.

On Monday, responding to the previous night’s fatal ambush, Catholics from some of the 12 communities that make up the Chiapas county of San Juan Chamula sent a letter to Mexican President Vicente Fox warning that they were going to be obligated “to use the law of talion” -- that is, an eye for an eye.

The Catholics also stated in their letter that Sunday’s attack had been carried out by 10 indigenous evangelicals from the community of Bautista Chico, according to an account in the Mexico City newspaper Reforma.

The killings were the latest acts of violence in a complicated religious, political and cultural struggle that dates from the 1970s, when significant numbers of Indian Catholics began converting to evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant beliefs. Catholics, particularly those in San Juan Chamula, responded by expelling thousands of Protestant converts from their villages.

In July 1999, a gun battle between Catholics and evangelical Protestants left at least seven people wounded. A government spokesman said the clash erupted when three evangelicals went to preach in the small mountain town of Icalumtic, six miles northeast of San Cristobal de las Casas. Another wave of killings, assassinations and injuries began last spring, claiming Catholic and Protestant victims.

Adding a potent political twist, the Catholic caciques, or leaders, have been closely allied for generations with Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled the country for 71 years, until 2000.

Many evangelicals converted to other political parties, and in recent years they have emerged as natural allies of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which came out of the Chiapas jungle in January 1994 to declare its opposition to Mexico’s political establishment and its support for the rights of indigenous peoples.