“I would have liked a happy life”

(Translated from Spanish)

Text and photos: Fátima Monterrosa, Special Correspondent

Acteal, Chiapas.- At the age of 10, Ernestina Pérez Luna became mother of two little girls. Her dolls, toys, friends, and school were all left behind. At her young age, she learned to cook beans, toss tortillas, wash clothes, gather firewood and plant vegetables and corn.

After 22 December 1997, she devoted herself to caring for her two little sisters, who were orphaned just like her: Zenaida, 4 years old, and Rosella, 2.

Ernestina’s studies were cut short in her fourth year of elementary school, where she only learned to draw a few doodles.

A radical change in her life, which made her sick with sadness in her heart.

“That pain marked me, and so far I have not been able to relieve it,” confesses this Tzotzil native who still lives in the Acteal Alto community.

Men carrying powerful weapons—R-15s, AK-47s, sawed-off .22-caliber rifles—who wore navy blue uniforms and covered their faces with red handkerchiefs, killed five members of her family: her father, Miguel Pérez Jiménez, and her mother, Marcela Luna Ruiz, as well as her brother Alejandro and her sisters Juana and Silva, respectively 15, 8 and 6 years old.

Of the Pérez Luna family, only Ernestina, Zenaida, who was left blind by a bullet shard to her head, and Roselia, who was grazed by a bullet in her mouth, survived. 

Ten years have passed since Ernestina took charge of them. Thus, she was forced to give up what remained of her childhood, of her adolescence.

“I suffered greatly. It was very difficult, because I didn’t know how to take care of the baby while by grandparents were taking care of my other sister in the hospital. I had to make an effort. My heart was sick. I had been orphaned.”

Now, at the age of 20, she is an expert in the kitchen and in fieldwork. Though ready for marriage, she is not interested in getting married; she has other concerns.

For Ernestina, there are no weekends or holidays. Every day is the same: she gets up at 4:00 in the morning, stokes the fire, tosses tortillas, heats the beans and prepares coffee in her house of wooden planks, blackened by the firewood that burns on the ground, where they cook on a grill and on very rare occasion eat chicken or beef.  She does not even know the taste of milk.

She tends to her sisters and then goes to work in the field, accompanied by her grandfather, Antonio Luna Santiz.

For Ernestina—fair skin, big brown eyes, long, straight hair that goes down to her calves because it has never been cut—the illnesses that have weakened her grandparents are a concern, since she has no money to buy medicines, much less to provide for Zenaida and Roselia. 

“We don’t know how we’re going to live in the coming years. We have no money or mom or dad. I don't know what I’m going to do with my sisters in order to feed them.”

“And you don’t plan on getting married?”

“I don’t plan on abandoning my sisters. I’m going to keep taking care of them. I’m not interested in getting married.”

“Do you think fate has been unfair with you?”

“I feel that life has treated me poorly. I would have liked a happy life with my parents, getting to be like other kids who walk and play with their parents. If my father were living, I wouldn’t work like a man in the field, and he would be in charge of us.”

Ernestina has a very vague memory of them. Of her father, she has only a small photograph that has started to fade, while of her mother she does not even have that.

“What goes through your head each day? What do you think about?”

“I worry about my grandparents, who are sick and don’t receive medical care. If they die, I’m going to be orphaned all over again.”

“Would you like to keep studying?”

“No, because I have to go to the cornfield and take care of my sisters.”

During the coffee seasons, Ernestina and her grandfather harvest up to 120 kilos, for which they are paid between 10 and 15 pesos per kilogram.

Ernestine’s heart grows even sadder when she hears what they will receive for their harvest. Barely 1,800 pesos to survive for an entire year.

* * 

Many Mexicans perhaps do not remember it. Still others have wanted to bury that part of our history. But the memory of Acteal will be difficult to silence. It remains there, still awaiting justice to be served for the murder of 45 Tzotzil natives shot down one December day ten years ago: 21 women, four of them pregnant, 15 children and nine men.

It happened on a cold and rainy morning on the 22^nd of December, 1997, nights before the celebration of the advent of the Son of God.

An armed, priista-affiliated group invaded that community of the Chenalhó municipality, in the heights of Chiapas, and attacked men, women and children while they were praying for peace in a chapel.

Dozens of native families held wakes for their dead on Christmas Eve and buried them on Christmas Day.

A decade has gone by since that vigil which abounded with children. Along with them, the future of those who escaped the killing was also buried.

They are the children of Acteal, today adolescents and youths who survive abandoned to their luck in poverty and marginalization.

The furrows of land that were bathed in native blood continue to call out for justice. The wound remains open, latent.

The victims who did not die, warn: “If Acteal remains in impunity, sooner or later another massacre may take place."

The growth of the paramilitary groups that intended to curb the presence of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in indigenous communities, culminated in the homicide of 45 natives. Acteal was the population chosen by the Máscara Roja group to perpetrate its attack.

The men, who carried high-caliber weapons for the Army’s exclusive use, arrived at the community in three freight trucks. They descended stealthily, surrounded them and opened fire.

Everyone, regardless of age or sex, was grazed by bullets from AK-47s. And as if that were not enough, some received the coup de grâce, and still others were mutilated at the point of a machete.

The dead: 33 women, ranging in age from 65 to 11 months, four of them pregnant; four children between the ages of four and 15, and eight men between 25 and 68 years of age. Furthermore, a score of injured men and women.

“How did we survive? I was stranded after the gunfire and until everything was over. I saw how those who fired were lifting the skits of the women, dead or alive. They were laughing. Those who were alive, were crying,” recounted Erasto Ruiz Pérez three days after the paramilitary raid.

The 18-year-old youth had received a gunshot in the stomach and was convalescing in the San Cristóbal de las Casas Hospital. He had lost his mother and two-year-old brother.

The attack had been announced in advance in the media. And no authority stopped it. Weeks after the tragedy, armed civilians linked with the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party) had expelled natives from their communities who sympathized with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and formed part of the Las Abejas Civil Society.

They robbed them of their few belongings, burned their homes and took over the lands. “The priistas wanted to force me to burn my companions’ house, and I didn’t want to. So, I left my home in Quextic, went to Acteal and prayed,” explained Erasto, who fled his community for fear of being killed.

Like him, some 6,000 indigenous peoples took refuge in Acteal, X’oyep and Polhó, where they set up camp with branches, banana leaves and plastic remnants. They were barely sheltered from the rain and the cold.

The destination held hundreds of displaced natives, who had fled from the paramilitary groups.

Many were stranded in a muddy hollow in an attempt to save their lives. Today their bodies remain in the same place, but in wooden coffins.

Before the Acteal massacre, the acts of violence that had taken place in various communities of Chenalhó had left a balance of 62 dead, 42 injured and more than 6,000 injured, as documented by the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Center for Human Rights.

* * *

The almond-shaped eyes of Zenaida Pérez Luna lost their glimmer, and her face lost its joy.

The shard from a bullet that was lodged in her head robbed her of her sight when she was four years old.

She is tiny, fragile and pale, condemned to live as an orphan, just like her two sisters who survived the bullets of an AK-47.

She cannot distinguish colors, only shades. She cannot see the stars, those diamonds that line the Acteal night and which make crickets and cicadas harmonize symphonies during the frozen twilight of winter.

Ten years in the darkness have turned her into a tormented, quiet girl. Zenaida is already 14 and has began adolescence, but still does not know, does not feel it; in her confusions, she continues to be a child.

She has great difficulty in the sixth grade at Vicente Guerrero Elementary School, where she struggles to distinguish a few scrawls on the chalkboard. She does not have three-dimensional vision. The teachers have been passing her because she has the hope of finishing school.

Her grandmother Catarina Ruiz Pérez became her guide: she takes her to school and returns her home, because Zenaida trips over things while walking.

No matter how much she strives to take part in household chores, she cannot embroider or make tortillas.

In 2008 she will turn 15, and fantasizes about three wishes: recovering her sight, that her grandmother heals from the illnesses she has acquired over the years, and that someone gives her a skirt.

For now, a worn and discolored skirt is her everyday outfit. Her slender body and ashen skin, tanned by the sun and mud, shiver with the cold that falls over these mountains.

There is no furniture or beds in her home. Only a few small circular benches that are used when they make tortillas.

At dinner time, along with her grandparents, sisters and cousins, Zenaida sits around a bonfire that burns on the ground. They share bean soup and a few tortillas. Six kilos of corn are enough for 12 people everyday.

At night, they use a few planks on the floor as a bed. They huddle their bodies to shelter themselves from the wind that slips in through the cracks of the wooden house.

They do not have drinking water or sewage.

They receive no minimal benefits from government programs: neither Progresa or Oportunidades, neither Seguro Popular or Procampo, neither Alianza para el Campo or support for the elderly or grants. Nothing of that kind.

Zenaida’s grandmother laments that the girls have ended up in destitution and do not receive the aid that authorities have promised. “They are suffering greatly… Who is going to take care of them, since I am already old and can no longer work? I am getting weaker and weaker, and I don't have money, and we hardly have enough to eat. We need someone to support us. Coffee leaves us with little, and the corn and bean crops are what we eat.”

Zenaida is hopeful that her eyes will recover sight, but she has no hope of escaping the poverty in which she lives.

* * *

After the mass burial, the Attorney General of the Republic implemented an ostentatious mechanism for detaining those responsible for the killings in the communities of Los Chorros, Puebla, La Esperanza and Quextic, considered to be bases of the priista paramilitaries.

Dozens of natives were detained, among them the mayor of Chenalhó, Jacinto Arias Cruz, accused of having distributed weapons to civilians linked to the PRI and the Cardenist Front, which were lead by Manuel Anzaldo Meneses and Juana García Palomares. Then-state governor, Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro, tried to shirk from his liability, but against pressure from civil society and international organizations, he resigned from office 16 days after the massacre in Acteal.

The government of Ernesto Zedillo, for the purpose of confronting the scandal that has crossed borders, created the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Addressing Crimes Committed in Chenalhó on March 12, 1988.

This office began nine trials and issued arrest warrants against 135 suspects, 84 of which went to jail, among which were a mayor, a soldier and 12 state policemen. All were accused of homicide, injuries and bearing arms without a license.

Various arrest warrants remained pending and, for better or for worse, ceased to exist on April 17, 2000.

Jorge Madrazo, then-Attorney General of the Republic, affirmed that the massacre had three causes: historical confrontations, the illegal creation of the Autonomous Municipal Council of Polhó, and the non-existence of a state of law.

Twenty-seven natives received sentences of 35 years in prison; recently another 49 received sentences of 26 years. On the other hand, the public servants detained received a sentence only three and seven years in prison, and today they are free.

Five years ago, the Second District Court released six of the accused for lacking legal elements to hold them responsible. It ruled that the evidence contributed by the Attorney General’s Office lacked legality.

Two natives sentenced to 25 years in prison were released for reasons of humanity (for age and health). One of them just died.

No high-ranking official was punished, despite a recommendation from the National Human Rights Commission that indicated that several were responsible by omission. Among them was the then-Secretary of State of Chiapas, Homero Tovilla Cristiani.

Gonzalo Ituarte, at that time member of the National Intermediation Commission (CONAI), revealed that, hours before the armed group finished the massacre, the Secretary of State was notified of the violent events that were taking place in Acteal. The official answered that nothing was happening there.

* * *

Seven bullets destroyed the life of Catarina Méndez Paciencia without killing her: they left her handicapped, unfit for marriage and unable to conceive children.

The bursts from the AK-47s also caught her mother, Manuela Paciencia Moreno, her sister Margarita, her sister-in-law Marcela Capote and her five-year-old nephew Vicente Méndez Capote.

Catarina is 30 today and has lost all hope of forming a family, like she used to dream of a decade ago.

Today, Catarina can barely walk. One of the projectiles that hit her pierced her hip, another pierced an ankle, another four pierced her right arm, and one more opened her left hand.

She was bedridden for more than five years. After multiple surgeries and rehabilitation sessions financed by civic organizations, she learned to take her first steps once again.

Her legs rapidly tire; as she cannot walk long distances, she does not go to the cornfield or the coffee plantations.

The plate and three screws she has in her ankle bother her; she feels as though they are burning her skin.

She tried to hide the scars that mark her body and soul with a large, navy blue skirt and a red blouse that she embroidered. But her face shows her despair, which cannot be hidden.

When she was 16-years-old, she rejected a marriage proposal; she did not want to get married before her two older sisters, Ana and Margarita. She begged her father, Antonio Méndez Hernández, not to force her to get married to the man who had set his eyes on her, because he had a bad reputation: he had abandoned a woman and liked to drink hard liquor.

Antonio handed over his firstborn. So it was that Ana gave birth to eight children with that man. The youngest of her children was born four months ago.

Luck did not smile on Margarita, either: the bullets of the paramilitaries cut her life short on December 22, 1997.

And that day Catarina became a woman who would find it difficult to find a husband.

Since then, she has been passed from hospital to hospital. Her situation keeps her from doing household chores, loading firewood and going to the field, as Tzotzil women customarily do. At the age of 30, it is impossible for her to compete with the young singles of her community.

Catarina asked the Virgin of Guadalupe to close all her wounds. The tragedy still hurts her as if it had taken place yesterday.

“What were you doing that day?”

“When the paramilitaries arrived, we were praying in church. We had been fasting for three days. They came firing, so I ran with my sister-in-law to a ravine. My mom and my sister left for somewhere else and, after a while, came out of hiding. They were maybe four meters away from where we were hidden, and I saw when they killed them… There was a boy with us named Ricardo; he was a year and a half old. He cried with fear. His cry gave us away to the armed men, who fired at us. That was when they injured me.”

The bullets knocked down the Tzotzil native. She crawled among the red clay and the thickets until she came across an injured woman and lay down beside her. Then she covered her face with her face with the bloodied clothing of her companion, who had just passed away.

“I pretended to be dead. I was very frightened. I tried not to move. My heart beat very strongly. The woman was bleeding a lot, and her blood was getting in my face. I was afraid that the men would see that I was alive and would finish me off.”

Three hours after the armed group had perpetrated the attack, Catarina was losing strength and prepared to die. One of the Red Cross ambulances that arrived at that moment transferred her to the San Cristóbal de las Casas Regional Hospital.

“What has your life been like all these years?”

“I have a lot of pain and fear. I’m afraid that the killers will return. Now nothing is the same. I remember when I went to cut coffee; now I can’t go anywhere, just to hospitals. My life isn’t normal. I can’t work like before.”

Catarina’s deep black eyes begin to tear up. She tries to dry her tears with her hands.

She wants to forget. But she smiles when I ask her if she wants to get married. Her thick lips allow a glimpse of a row of platinum teeth while she fixes her braided hair with green and purple ribbons.

Catarina lives in Quextic, three kilometers away from Acteal, amongst ravines, muddy hollows and streams. She shares a small wooden shack with her father, her sister Ana, Ana’s husband and her eight children.

The therapies she undergoes at the National Rehabilitation Institute have allowed her to walk again. She receives free medical assistance, but must pay for her medicines. On many occasions, she has stopped taking them because she does not have enough money to buy them.

The Ministry of Health pays for her transportation, food and lodging when she comes for rehabilitation in the Federal District. They examine her and write the prescription, but they do not provide her with the medications. Every time she is in the Federal District, she goes to the Basilica to entrust herself to the Virgin of Guadalupe and ask that she heal her wounds.

 * * *

The attack carried on for several hours. The natives who managed to flee hid themselves in a deep trench, without imagining that there they would be gunned down at point-blank range by the armed men.

“The priistas came dressed as soldiers. “They killed everyone who had hidden in the caves,” told Catarina Vázquez Gómez shortly after having escaped the massacre.

The Red Cross reported that the deceased suffered from gunshot wounds, dismemberment of legs, arms and other parts of the body due to machete strikes.

International organizations and civil society make an extreme effort with the Acteal community to assist the survivors.

Ten years after the tragedy, they have ended up alone. The aid slowly disappeared, just like the 35,000 pesos that the state government handed over to the family members of victims. That was the price that it allotted to the life of each Chiapaneco native killed: 35,000 pesos.

Ten years after the tragedy, ex-President Ernesto Zedillo stated from abroad his “sadness” for the 45 dead natives and defended the investigation carried out by the Attorney General’s Office during his term.

“I remember this event with great sadness, and I also remember that the Attorney General of the Republic carried out some serious investigations… But my conclusion is that it is something that should still sadden us and that all of us must continue to lament,” stated Zedillo in Madrid, Spain.

* * *

The majority of the victims were members of Las Abejas, an organization created by catechists of the diocese of San Cristóbal de las Cases in the municipality of Chenalhó in 1992.

Las Abejas define themselves as pacifists, defend human rights in communities and seek peace with justice and dignity. They have played an important role in recent years, upon extending their activities to the municipalities of Tenejapa, Chalchihuitán and Simojovel.

In February 2005, Las Abejas and the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Center for Human Rights brought a complaint before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the Mexican government for the Acteal killings. “Many years have gone by, and we have not found justice in this country; thus, this petition,” they indicated.

With support of donations, they built the Indigenous Ceremonial Center and the Open Ecumenical Chapel. A galley of iron and sheets that they mounted over the 45 graves.

They created the Mayavinic Coffee Producers Union, which exports its production abroad.

They founded a community radio station. From 4:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night, nine native presenters broadcast programs in Tzotzil and Tzeltal to promote the defense of collective and individual human rights. Radio Abejas Chapul Pom has other programs and broadcast traditional music of indigenous peoples, ranchera songs, cumbias and duranguenses. They send out messages of peace and tell Tzotzil stories. For its peaceful fight and defense of rights, it was awarded by the Republic of France.

* * *

José Alfredo Jiménez forms part of the Indigenous Communicator Network, which is in charge of giving community and popular communication workshops in rural areas. He made a documentary about the indigenous radio that secretly operations in the ravines, which was selected at three national and international film festivals. Currently, he is preparing a video with testimonies of the survivors of the Acteal killings.

José Alfredo personally experienced the violence of the paramilitaries, who attacked his community, Yibeljo, burning houses and beating the inhabitants. He took refuge with his family in the X’oyep camp for the displaced. They lived in exile for three years.

Saint Death protects little Efraín Gómez Luna. The same one who took away his mother and whom he forgave ten years ago.

He was two years old when he was saved from dying at the hands of the Máscara Roja group in Acteal.

Efraín survived because his mother, Irma Luna Pérez, who was five months pregnant, protected him with her body. She received the rain of projectiles. But a bullet reached the boy and destroyed his jaw.

The doctors gave him a plate and did little else to reconstruct that part of his face. A scar 15 centimeters long crosses from his chin down to his throat.

On his neck, near the injury, hangs a plastic medal with the image of Saint Death that he bought at a fair. And on his left hand he wears a wooden bracelet with the same image.

He is 12 years old, but he looks like a child of 8, on account of his stature. He is short and thin. And he no longer lives in Acteal.

Along with his father, his stepmother and his three new siblings, Efraín took a bus and arrived at Tuxtla Gutiérrez in search of better life opportunities. Eight hours of work in the field cutting coffee and cleaning corn only leaves them with 20 pesos a day. His father, Victorio Gómez Pérez, does not have enough to support his family.

In the capital of Chiapas, Efraín and his father sell chilies, sweets, peanuts and cigarettes wherever they can: park, cafeterias, and snack centers of the San José Terán district.

Efraín became a “little kangaroo,” as indigenous children who sell sweets in Tuxtla Gutiérrez are called.

When his father works as a construction worker, the small Tzotzil carries 15-kilogram wooden box that displays a great variety of candies. On other occasions, he shines shoes at five pesos per pair.

“I leave at 10:00 in the morning to sell sweets. I come back to eat around 4:00 in the afternoon. I leave again and get back to the room around 11:00 or 12:00 at night,” he tells.

The fact of the matter is that Efraín likes to earn money to contribute to supporting his family. “When it goes well for me, I get around a hundred pesos selling sweets, and then shining and polishing shoes, I earn around fifty pesos,” he says with enthusiasm.

Despite the fact that he cannot read or write, he gets by with ease in the city. He learned to speak Spanish very quickly.

“What do you like to do?”

“Work. Well, I also like to watch soccer and westerns on TV. As we can’t buy a television, sometimes I go to the man’s house who rents us the room, and he lets me watch TV with them.”

“What team do you root for?”

“I like the Pumas. I hope they win the championship.”

Efraín likes to sell in the cafeterias, because that way he can watch the games that are broadcast pay-per-view.

His family rents a small terrace room for 500 pesos a month on 2^nd Avenida Norte Oriente, number 299, in the Terán district.

In that same room, the owner keeps old and useless things that Efraín’s sisters play with. Another room is inhabited by eight youths, all relatives of victims of Acteal who also left the community to sell sweets and gum.

“It’s going well for us here, selling candy. It’s not much, but it’s enough to support the family in Acteal. It makes us want to leave for the other side,” remarks Juan Guzmán Gutiérrez, Efraín’s uncle, speaking of immigrating to the United States, “but they charge a lot, and we’re also afraid that the coyotes will abandon us in the desert.”

Efraín’s cheerful expression changes when he is asked about his recovery. He complains that he has not received rehabilitation in one year.

“I no longer go to the doctor. There is no one to help me. I want to go to Mexico City so they can see me, but nobody helps us. This piece of iron that they put in my mouth hurts me when I eat.”

The metal plate is already small for him, due to the fact that his bones are growing.

His memories of Acteal are few: “My mom is buried there. My house was locked up there, and it makes me sad, because they stole my bicycle.”

Nothing seems to have changed in the 3,650 days that have passed since the killings in this community in the heights of Chiapas.

Here, the future simply does not exist. Poverty is everywhere. And the government’s promises to tend to the most urgent needs of the indigenous people have never become reality. The carts full of resources that would arrive ten years ago, who knows where they went?

In accordance with the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, the municipality of Chenalhó registers a very high index of marginalization. The statistic will remain there. Just like the nearly 30 collapses on the highway that connects San Juan Chamula with Chenalhó that cleanly cuts off passage. For years the highway has shown faults, and nobody bothered to repair it.

Last year, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples announced the reconstruction of the 59.9-kilometer road. Today, the Tzotzil natives are still waiting on the repair of the only asphalt road that they have in the municipality.

The orphans and survivors of the massacre also keep hoping that government support will arrive.

During Pablo Salazar’s administration, the state government signed an agreement with the Las Abejas Civic Organization by which the authorities committed to support the victims of the massacre through education, medical assistance, housing and food.

Nothing has been accomplished.

And the wounds remain open.