Las Abejas
Chiapas’ Pacifist Bees

By Nathaniel J. Katz

ovember was cold and rainy in the Mexican highlands of Chiapas. Mud was everywhere. Conditions at the refugee camps there are terrible. Many of the makeshift houses consist of no more than a tin roof and nylon for walls. Children are sick and malnourished; most have no shoes, and some have no sweaters. The food consists of beans, tortillas and occasionally rice or pasta. Firewood is in short supply.

Clouds of incense spread across a glade during a Sunday morning outdoor service in Acteál. Photo by Nathaniel Katz.

I spent last November in Chiapas, working as a human rights observer in the refugee camps at X’oyep and Acteál. The residents of the camps are indigenous Chiapas Mexicans, the majority of them driven from their homes in 1997 during the most violent repression of the Zapatista uprising that started in 1994. Most of the people at the camp at Acteál are survivors of a massacre that took place December 22, 1997, when Mexican paramilitaries gunned down 45 women, men and children who belonged to a Catholic pacifist movement called Las Abejas—the Bees—while they were holding a prayer for peace.

A year to the date after the massacre, Mexico’s Attorney General published a White Paper about it. The paper described the slaughter as a result of intercommunity feuds between indigenous government supporters and Zapatista sympathizers and claimed that political, economic and religious divisions in the municipality of Chenalhó had led to an increase in violence. There was no mention that the government-aligned paramilitaries who committed the crime had bought their arms with government money. (The report did suggest some high-level government involvement, however, which led to the resignation of Mexico’s interior minister and the governor of Chiapas. The governor is now enjoying diplomatic immunity as the Agricultural Attaché to the Mexican Embassy in Washington.

The Bee Hive
Las Abejas came together before the Zapatista rising, in the municipality of Chenalhó in the Chiapas highlands. Chenalhó lies about an hour and a half north of the colonial city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. It is an almost entirely indigenous municipality; about half the population is illiterate, and about a third speaks only Tzotzil (the local Mayan language).

The weavers of the refugee camp at X’oyep have formed a cooperative to sell their work. Photo by Nathaniel Katz.

In December of 1992, a group of Catholic villagers from the Chenalhó hamlet of Tzahalchen marched to a local jail to protest the arrest of five of their neighbors for the alleged murder of supporters of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as the PRI). The protesters won their point, and the accused villagers were released. The success of the march inspired a larger number of Chenalhó ’s indigenous Catholics to form a nonviolent group in the hope of staying out of the intensifying divisions between armed leftist and government-aligned local movements. By the time of the massacre at the end of 1997, the Abejas had 4,000 members in 25 communities in Chenalhó .

Much like other indigenous movements in Chiapas, Las Abejas organized themselves democratically, with roots in both indigenous traditions and the Mexican left. The groups in each community elect representatives to meet with the group’s Board of Directors in Acteál. Each community chooses representatives; the number depends on the size of the community. The Board of Directors is also elected by the people, for a term of eighteen months.

Mexico’s Indigenous Movements
There was already a history of indigenous movements in Chiapas, attributed by many to the appointment of Samuel Ruiz García as the Bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, which is composed of the poorest, mostly indigenous regions of the state. Ruiz arrived in Chiapas in 1960, and upon visiting the poor Indian villages of the district was converted from conservatism to social activism. He wanted to make the Mexican Catholic church a “church of the poor.” Along with two other bishops, Ruiz formed the Mexican Bishops’ Mutual Aid Union, a church project to promote social work in poor districts. He founded schools to train religious teachers—more than half of them indigenous—who would also develop programs in the communities.

Working among Mexico’s poorest, the Diocese found itself associating with the Mexican Left, which was building support in Chiapas for a revolution. Although Ruiz strongly advocated an unarmed movement, he recognized what he described as the “tendency toward the upsurge of armed movements in the state.” Ruiz attracted both strong criticism—from the conservative Mexican church and the PRI, which nicknamed him the “Red Bishop”—and an ally, the French priest, Father Michel Chateau. In the late 1960s Chateau arrived in the highlands and quickly gained a reputation for his work with the poor and his help in their organizing. Chateau’s 30 years in Chiapas and his influence on the indigenous Catholics there may have influenced the villagers who formed Las Abejas; he was deported in 1998 by the Mexican government as part of a broad attack on foreigners who were accused of meddling in the nation’s politics.

The Bees and the Zapatistas
On January 1, 1994, an indigenous army calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (in Mexico, EZLN) staged an uprising in Chiapas. Named for Emiliano Zapata, the indigenous leader of the Mexican Revolution of 1911-1917, the revolutionists took over the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas and some smaller towns and villages in the state, demanding autonomy within Mexico for indigenous populations along with “work, land, housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, democracy, justice and peace.” The Abejas sympathized with the Zapatistas’ demands, but their commitment to nonviolence kept them separate from the EZLN.

In 1996, two years after the beginning of the uprising, the government signed the San Andres Peace Accords, which granted some of the demands. The accords have yet to be implemented, and Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon has since then committed himself to defeating the indigenous struggle in Chiapas by force. The year 1997 saw both increased military presence and greater paramilitary activity. Paramilitary groups were growing because the government gave young and extremely poor indigenous villagers weapons, alcohol and payments of up to 150 pesos a month. The paramilitary threat in Chenalhó was so grave that about 10,000 Zapatista sympathizers—including approximately 2,500 of las Abejas—were forced to leave the communities where the paramilitaries were strongest. The refugee Abejas gathered in two main camps (called peace camps by the indigenous inhabitants): X’oyep, which is temporary home for 1,600 people from six communities, and Acteál, which houses 668 from various communities.

The 1997 massacre in Acteál brought increased attention to the serious problems in Chenalhó. The small pacifist group received the kind of international coverage that had until then been reserved for the armed Zapatistas. Since then, Las Abejas have sent representatives to a U.N. Human Rights Convention in Geneva, to an indigenous march in Washington and to a women’s rights conference in Boston. The children injured in the massacre were flown to the United States for medical treatment. The Abejas now send out regular press releases about the increasing militarization of the area and about the government’s human rights abuses.

In January of 1998, when the military tried to enter X’oyep to “enforce federal firearms laws,” the women of the community formed a human wall at the entry. The military retreated and eventually withdrew. And when a Christian Peacemakers Team from the United States and Canada helped the people of X’oyep enter a local military base and plant corn (and pray for peace) on the grounds, some soldiers even joined in the prayers. Others from outside Mexico have helped the Abejas start writing down their oral history, and their folklore (along with some health manuals) in Tzotzil. A few men and women from X’oyep recently participated with Christian Peacemaker Team members in a fast for peace outside the base.

The women have recently formed an artisans’ cooperative, and the men have formed “coffee brigades”—teams of villagers accompanied by non-Indian Mexican observers so they can return safely to their coffee fields at harvest time. Last January, the Associated Press reported that these brigades were confronted and threatened by PRI supporters. They have also formed a coffee cooperative that will be ready for next year’s harvest to counter the exploitation of the “coyotes,” middle men who buy coffee at $1 a kilogram and sell it to large coffee buyers, who then sell it in First World countries for $12 a pound.

But the displacement has taken its toll on the Abejas of Acteál and X’oyep. The men are unable to return to their lands and work their fields; their day consists of cutting firewood in the morning, and nothing more. (The effects on the women were harder to evaluate; many of the women don’t speak Spanish and remain in their homes during the day.) The children attend school, where they are taught by men from the refugee communities who are learning the material as they teach it.

Children at play at X’oyep. Photo by Nathaniel Katz.

Every afternoon at five, the entire community meets for prayer. (The men usually show up much earlier to chat.) A meeting follows the prayer session in which the entire community discusses and comes to consensus on proposed resolutions of the Abejas Board of Directors; the representatives then present the decisions to the board.

Militarization
The situation in Chiapas continues to deteriorate. The church recently transferred indigenous sympathizer Raul Vera, who was expected to succeed Samuel Ruiz as bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de las Casas, to Saltillo in Northern Mexico. A moderate was appointed instead, which the indigenous of Chiapas took to indicate Vatican support for the government. In January an appeals court in Mexico overturned the convictions of more than 20 people accused of carrying out the 1997 massacre. The army continues to harass the indigenous population and foreign observers. Zapatista communities have refused to allow entry to Red Cross personnel, accusing them of being eyes for the government. The EZLN has also accused hospitals of sterilizing women who come seeking medical help and of stealing babies from indigenous mothers—possibly for adoption outside Mexico—and telling the mothers that the babies died.

Militarization in Chenalhó is increasing at alarming rates. There are large military bases outside of indigenous communities in resistance. Surveillance flights over the communities occur on a near-daily basis. Reuters news service estimated last January that troop levels in Chiapas ranged “from 30,000 to as high as 70,000.” The U.S. government continues to send military aid and training to Mexico, under the auspices of the anti-drug war. The Latin America Working Group estimates that U.S. military aid to Mexico in 1999 was at least $21 million. More than 600 Mexican military personnel were trained in the United States in 1998. Global Exchange writes in its report “On the Offensive” that a third of Mexico’s federal army is stationed in Chiapas. Many here believe that this is not to combat drugs, and that the Mexican military is engaged in a low-intensity war to divide and defeat the indigenous movement in Chiapas; the Abejas call it “the second massacre.”

Paramilitary activity also continues. While I was in Chiapas last November, 42 people, mostly children, arrived in Acteál from the hamlet of Canolál, reporting that paramilitaries had threatened their lives.

My friend Jose Alfredo, from X’oyep, spoke to me of the Abejas path of nonviolence. He said that arms were the way to death, and that through faith and prayer Las Abejas will prevail. Before the massacre, they thought that they were alone in their struggle. Now foreigners visit and give them confidence to continue.

Nathaniel J. Katz is WRL’s Spring 2000 Freeman Intern.