Gilberto López y Rivas, La Jornada
On April 30, 1999, as the president of the Concord and Pacification Commission, I filed a complaint with the then Attorney General’s Office (PGR) regarding the existence of paramilitary groups in Chiapas, one of which perpetrated the Acteal massacre on December 22, 1997.
This appeal denounced the implementation by the Mexican military of a strategy of irregular warfare, described in Sedena2 manuals and in the Chiapas 94 Campaign Plan, and the application of a counterinsurgency tactic known as anvil and hammer, which consists of the armed forces acting as passive containment (anvil), under the protection of the legal framework, while the paramilitary groups (hammer) clandestinely operate active harassment against communities and support bases of the EZLN. Even Mexican strategists use an illustrative metaphor to explain the function of these paramilitary groups, arguing that not only must the water (popular support) be taken away from the fish (insurgency), but that fiercer fish must be put into the water.
In this argument, the presence of military or ex-military personnel in the Acteal massacre in direct relation to the Sedena command was highlighted. One was identified as Mariano Perez Ruiz, who, in June 1998, declared before the PGR, according to file 96/98, that former PRI officials and leaders are responsible for hiring military and police to instruct indigenous communities of Chenalho in the handling of weapons and paramilitary strategy. In his declaration, Perez Ruiz added a significant clarification: “It is true what I declared in that sense, it was because elements of the Military Police forced me to say that, because if I did not do so, they were going to disappear me; besides, I was still an active military and I had to abide by the orders of my superiors” (GLR, Viejas y nuevas guerras sucias, in El Cotidiano, 172, 2012, UAM-A).
Although the results of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes Committed in the Procuration and Administration of Justice in the State of Chiapas, released in 2011, indicated, without a doubt, that a State crime had been committed in Acteal, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation set free several of the material authors of this crime against humanity, while the intellectual authors, accomplices and cover-ups, by omission or commission, were never prosecuted: the ex-president Ernesto Zedillo, federal, state and local officials, the leadership and officers of the armed forces, in the chain of command.
Two decades after this denunciation, the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center, in an urgent communiqué, makes known the innumerable aggressions against the communities of Aldama, Chiapas, significantly with the presence of the National Guard and state police.
Based on direct information from the Permanent Commission of the 115 community members and displaced persons of Aldama, the report describes the constant attacks with high caliber firearms coming “from points located in Santa Martha-Miguel Utrilla, municipality of Chenalhó, Chiapas, acts provoked by the paramilitary group in complicity with the municipal government (…) in a context of terror, where children, women and the population in general survive in a torturing environment. Governmental actions have been insufficient, ineffective and simulated, since they do not guarantee the security and integrity of the population”. It should be noted that this prestigious human rights organization has documented, monitored and denounced this counterinsurgency war of attrition since the first days of the Zapatista rebellion in January 1994.
In addition, the Civil Observation Mission, made up of 14 organizations of the National Network of Civil Human Rights Organizations All Rights for All, accompanied by three international organizations, visited, in December 2020, communities in the Northern, Highlands and Coast regions, where they documented critical situations of violation of basic rights, “with a worrying lack of will and empathy from the authorities (…). The Civil Observation Mission had the opportunity to visit the communities of Chalchihuitan, Acteal, Aldama, Nuevo San Gregorio, Moisés Gandhi, Chilón and Tonalá, where we gathered testimonies from those affected by situations of forced displacement, land dispossession, arbitrary detentions, torture, harassment, threats, criminalization, among other aggressions. (…) It is outrageous that the structural violence is allowed and even encouraged by the different levels of government and their little to no willingness to address the conflict, trivializing, discriminating and criminalizing the communities”.
Is another State crime being prepared?
1Fourth Transformation. López Obrador refers to the political movement under his administration as the Fourth Transformation or “4T” following other so-called transformations of Mexican politics: the War of Independence from Spain (First Transformation), the Reforms Period under Benito Juarez (Second Transformation), and the Mexican Revolution (Third Transformation)
2 Sedena. Secretaría de la defensa nacional de México. Mexican department of defense.
English translation by Sexta Grietas del Norte. Original Spanish: Paramilitarismo en Chiapas en la cuarta transformacion