Mexico Police Blamed for Role in Massacre

The New York Times
January 13, 1998
By JULIA PRESTON

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico -- Federal prosecutors have accused a state police commander of helping to arm a gang of paramilitary gunmen who murdered 45 Indian villagers in December. They are the first criminal charges filed against police and state government officials who have been under investigation for the massacre.

Federal prosecutors indicated that their investigation is closing in on higher state officials who may have provided direct support to the killers. They said that the police commander testified that "superior officers" ordered him to turn a blind eye to paramilitary groups flaunting illegal weapons in his precinct as long as they were sympathizers of the political party in power in Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

At the same time the National Human Rights Commission, a federal government agency, has described in a report how senior state officials and police commanders protected the killers after the slayings, mangled the crime scene without conducting an investigation, loaded the bodies "like merchandise" into a cargo truck and rushed them away from the village in pre-dawn darkness. They then altered official documents to protect themselves, the commission said.

The report and the arrest brought embarrassment for federal government leaders, who have condemned the murders and said they were not condoned at any level of the PRI, which controls both the federal government and southern Chiapas State, where the violence occurred. After the killings, President Ernesto Zedillo dismissed the Chiapas governor as well as his Interior Minister, the highest official in his Cabinet, for mishandling the surging violence in Indian communities in the state.

The new information suggests that the local police were officially encouraged to back paramilitary groups that have sprung up in Indian villages to confront followers of Zapatista guerrilla rebels. It also shows that top state officials were flatly indifferent to the mass killing, whose victims were members of an opposition organization, in the hours after it occurred.

The indicted commander, Felipe Vazquez Espinosa, was in charge of a police post a few miles from the riverside hamlet where Tzotzil Indian villagers, including many women and small children, were attacked during a prayer service and cut down with combat rifles and machetes. According to the warrant, he lent the killers, who were also Tzotzil Indians, police patrol cars to help them stockpile guns and ammunition near the murder site.

In its 220-page report the Human Rights Commission accused the highest officials and security commanders under the former governor, Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro, of "a grave accumulation of inefficiency and neglect" before and after the killings, in the township of Chenalho, as well as "passivity and indolence" in reacting to the massacre.

The commission found that police agents posted within earshot of the hamlet where the assault took place lied when they said they could not hear the shooting there, which dragged on sporadically over nine hours.

One police contingent reported that it did explore the hamlet for two hours at precisely the time when survivors said the killings were under way. The officers reported that they heard shots and saw that all the houses had been hastily abandonned.

But in their official report the police informed the state police commander they had "nothing new to report" from the hamlet.

Another police commander, who was summoned to the hamlet after dark by desperate villagers with gunshot wounds who staggered out to a police post, said he spent several hours helping evacuate the wounded to a distant hospital. He asserted that he did not notice until 11 p.m., more than 12 hours after the shooting began, that there were also dozens of dead bodies piled up on the bank of a nearby stream.

Later, the commission found, higher police officials altered the day's reports with crude smudges to make it appear that their agents had been ordered to the hamlet much later than they were.

The commission cited one witness, whose name was not given for his protection, who said that he saw the dark-uniformed gunmen returning to a neighboring hamlet after the killings, "where they were received with a hot meal."

The witness said that police agents tipped off the assailants that other police officers were coming to arrest them. A high-level police commander who the witness could not identify by name arrived and helped the killers to burn their uniforms and hide their weapons. The commander tried to assist the gunmen to flee, but some of them were captured soon after by state police from another unit.

During the day, when the attack was dragging on, senior Catholic Church leaders in Chiapas repeatedly called the secretary of state, the highest civilian official under the governor, to report shooting in Chenalho.

But the official, Homero Tovilla Cristiani, and the top state security official, Gen. Jorge Gamboa Solis, repeatedly told the Church officials that there was nothing to be alarmed about. The commission said it collected "incontrovertible evidence" that that these officials knew early in the day of violence in Chenalho, but were unconcerned.

A low-level state justice official arrived at the site before dawn together with a top personal aide to Gov. Ruiz Ferro. Together they decided to pile the bodies in the only truck available and remove them. No effort was made to gather evidence at the site or carefully assess the state of the victims.

"We didn't have any means to preserve the crime scene," the justice official, David Gomez Hernandez, explained casually to Commission investigators.

But in a chilling allegation, forensic specialists working for the commission found that three of the victims, including a 12-year-old boy, did not die immediately from their gunshot wounds. The commission concluded that these villagers might have been saved had the police acted more quickly, and raised the possibility that they might have been alive when they were carted away in the truck.

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