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By Chris Covert
Two individuals claiming to be representatives of the 45 victims of the 1997 Acteal, Chiapas massacre, told the Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nacion (SCJN) in a letter that former president Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon should be judged criminally and not civilly, according to a report by the Mexican leftist weekly Proceso.
The letter was presumably authored by Porfirio Arias Hernandez and Enrique Perez Santi, whom Proceso says are leaders of the pacifist religious sect Las Abeas, the target of the December 1997 massacre.
The letter is in response to the SCJN decision February 1st to not only release six of the original 34 defendants in the case, but also to specifically declare them innocent of the crime, a rare move in Mexican jurisprudence.
To read the Rantburg report on the SCJN decision to release the seven defendants, click here.
President at the time of the massacre, Zedillo is currently being sued in US District Court in Connecticut for his role in the massacre. The original suit claims that Zedillo, as commander in chief of the armed forces in Mexico, is responsible for the planning and execution of the massacre, though many of the defendants detained at the time were local and state police agents.
To read the Rantburg report on the Zedillo lawsuit, click here and here.
The lawsuit could be decided this month on claims by Zedillo that as a former head of state he enjoys immunity from civil and criminal prosecutions, a concept that has a longstanding list of decisions and law supporting it, dating back more than 150 years.
The lawsuit itself is a curious one in that the Miami, Florida law firm pursuing it, Rafferty Kobert Tenenholtz, has zero experience in public interest or human rights law, although it does have some international business law trial experience.
Attempts by this writer two months ago to contact the law firm via a web form on their website acteal97.com have been ignored.
Receipt of the letter has yet to be acknowledged by the SCJN on its website or in any web search. It is unknown if the letter has actually reached the SCJN or how the reporters at Proceso came into possession of it.
According to the Proceso article, the authors stated that it was Zedillo's counterinsurgency policy which led to the murders, and that Zedillo himself betrayed the San Andreas Accords.
The counterinsurgency plan in Chiapas implemented by the Mexican Army under Zedillo was actually conceived under Zedillo's predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, after the Chiapas Conflict went hot in December of 1994, before a ceasefire was negotiated a few days later.
The San Andreas Accords were signed in 1996, putatively ending the conflict. The accords allowed municipalities to acquire autonomy subject to Chiapas Chamber of Deputies approval.
In the run up to the massacre, despite the peace agreement in place, the Marxist Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional, a group formed with the help of Guatemalan rebels who were using Mexico as a safe haven against Guatemalan Army attacks, had apparently organized protests and in some cases armed attacks against citizens who opposed the EZLN. According to a a government report released following the massacre, some groups of Mexican citizens responded in kind to EZLN's depredations throughout 1997.
Of the original 34 dependants in the case, only seven remain imprisoned for their role in the murders.