PRILINKED GUNMEN ATTACK MAYA VILLAGE, MASSACRE 45

MEXICO CITY Civilian gunmen linked to Mexico's longruling political
party swept into an isolated Maya Indian community in the southernmost
state of Chiapas, killing at least 45 men, women and children with
automatic weapons and machetes.

Monday's attack on Acteal, a small village near the Maya town of Chenalho
in the highlands, came after months of heightening tensions between
supporters of a leftist rebel group and those of the ruling party.

The massacre marks the bloodiest political violence in the strifetorn
state since an armed uprising four years ago that left at least 135 people
dead.

Those killed in Monday's attack include nine men, 21 women and 15 children,
including a newborn, according to the Mexican Red Cross. More than 20 other
people were injured in the attack, the Red Cross reported.

President Ernesto Zedillo, defacto leader of the ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to which the gunmen reportedly belong, on
Tuesday ordered a thorough federal investigation of the killings.

Ruling party officials in Chiapas and Mexico City rushed to condemn the
violence and to distance themselves from the gunmen's supposed political
affiliations.

"Many of (the gunmen) call themselves PRI members, but we don't recognize
them," Juan Carlos Gomez, the ruling party's Chiapas state leader, told an
interviewer on national radio Tuesday. "No organization involved in
violence can claim membership, not only in our party, but in any party."

Monday's massacre adds another bloody dimension to a growing sense of
insecurity and social breakdown across Mexico.

At least two guerrilla groups operate in the southern Mexico region.

Drug gangs wage bloody turf wars along the U.S. border.

Kidnapping has grown rampant.

And violent crime plagues Mexico City and other urban centers.

But while the Chiapas attack seems to mirror similar incidents that occur
almost weekly in Colombia the violent South American nation to which
Mexico is increasingly compared Monday's slaughter has deep roots in the
political and social conflicts confined to Chiapas.

Samuel Ruiz, the bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of San Cristobal de
las Casas to which Chenalho belongs, blamed the state and federal
governments. Calling it a "massacre foretold," Ruiz told reporters in
Chiapas that government officials had ignored warnings of impending
violence from Catholic humanrights workers.

Chiapas Gov. Julio Cesar Ruiz, a ruling party member, ordered an
investigation and promised that any state government official found
involved in the massacre would be prosecuted.

"These are not moments to fall into accusations," Ruiz said in a statement,
"but to act with firmness to solve this criminal, irrational and
unacceptable occurrence"

Chenalho has been the epicenter of mounting tensions in recent months as
Maya villagers loyal to the government have clashed repeatedly with local
supporters of the leftleaning Zapatista National Liberation Army.

The Zapatistas rocked Mexico by staging a brief but bloody uprising against
the government on Jan. 1, 1994. They were rebelling to protest the poverty
facing many Mexican peasants and for indigenous rights. A ceasefire was
declared by the government after only a few days of combat.

Peace talks between the rebels and government officials broke down more
than a year ago, but no new fighting has occurred. Thousands of Mexican
army troops ring the Zapatista guerrillas' small jungle enclave, although
the rebels continue to enjoy wide support in the region.

The Zapatista rebellion fizzled when the rest of Mexico's leftist and
peasant groups failed to join it. Still, the uprising set events in motion
that loosened the PRI's 65year choke hold on Mexican politics. The PRI's
candidate for the presidency, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated in
Tijuana in March 1994, while the party's second in command was gunned down
in Mexico City that September. Although gunmen have been convicted in both
killings, many Mexicans believe neither crime has been properly solved.

Zedillo succeeded Colosio as his party's candidate for president and won
the August 1994 election with just over half the vote. But the Mexican peso
collapsed three weeks after he took office that December, badly tarnishing
the ruling party's prestige.

The ensuing economic crisis led to the PRI's losing control of the national
congress and of Mexico City's government in last July's midterm elections,
ushering in an unprecedented age of democracy in Mexico.

Now largely forgotten in the rest of Mexico, the Zapatista rebellion
aggravated deep, longstanding differences within the Maya Indian
communities of Chiapas. The Tzotzilspeaking Maya group, of which Chenalho
is a major community, has been particularly plagued by the internal
divisions.

"Now, in Chenalho we are seeing a type of genocide," said Andres Aubry, a
Frenchborn anthropologist who has spent years studying the Chiapas Maya
and who has expressed support for the Zapatistas in the past. "The
conditions are very frightening."

The feuds in the Maya communities of the Chiapas highlands have been
religious as well as political, with evangelical Christians fighting
traditionalists in some villages and progovernment Protestants fighting
more liberal Catholics in others.

Experts say much of the conflict is really rooted in struggles for control
of ever scarcer farmland in the face of rapidly growing populations in the
Maya communities.

Those slaughtered on Monday were members of a proZapatista group known as
Las Abejas, the Bees, which challenged the PRIdominated municipal
government in Chenalho. Many of those killed were refugees who had been
driven out of their own villages by political violence in recent months.

Witnesses said scores of gunmen attacked the village of Acteal about 11
a.m. Monday, shooting people in the village and chasing survivors down a
mountainside and killing them along a riverbank.

"We are neutral. We are not supporting one side or the other," a weeping
Ernesto Mendez told Mexican television reporters Tuesday in Chiapas. Mendez
said he lost nine family members in the attack.

Violence has erupted sporadically across the Chiapas highlands since the
Zapatista uprising, claiming at least 300 lives. Local Roman Catholic
officials and humanrights groups have complained for years of paramilitary
organizations linked to the government waging violence in isolated
communities.

The progovernment groups accuse Bishop Ruiz and other local Catholic
leaders of supporting the Zapatistas and have targeted them for reprisals.

Gunmen fired on a convoy carrying Bishop Ruiz last month. The bishop
escaped unharmed, but two Maya villagers riding in the convoy were wounded.

Monday's massacre is the bloodiest political violence in Mexico since
attacks by supposed leftist guerrillas across the state of Oaxaca in August
1997 left nearly 30 dead.

Claiming to be members of the Popular Revolutionary Army, a shadowy group
was formed after police in the southern state of Guerrero gunned down 17
unarmed farmers headed for a protest against government farm policies.

Although there have been occasional clashes in both Guerrero and Oaxaca,
the Popular Revolutionary Army had been largely dormant for the past 15
months.

Colombia's 35year rural civil war claims about 10 lives a day. Most of
the victims are unarmed civilian supporters of either leftist guerrillas or
the rightwing militias that oppose them, and many die in massacres like
that in Chiapas Monday.

Although officials say both guerrillas and rightwing groups in Colombia
now finance themselves from the cocaine trade, the civil war started out as
a rural conflict very much like that in southern Mexico today.