Massacres Mexico

Investigators uncovered a small cache of arms buried outside the home of a suspect in the massacre of 45 Mexican villagers, authorities announced Friday. The two .22-caliber rifles, a shotgun, a revolver and ammunition "are similar to those used Dec. 22 in Acteal," the attorney general's office said in a statement.

While the government may consider the recent massacre of 45 peasants in Chiapas an outgrowth of local feuds, the bloodstained southern state represents to many analysts the dark side of Mexico's political transition, one of many examples of old power structures disintegrating--and being replaced by chaos, not democracy.

The men arrested in the massacre of 45 people in the village of Acteal look much like their victims. They speak the same Maya Indian language. They live in the same highlands municipality. They farm the same subsistence plots. That has left many Mexicans struggling to understand how political differences among them could have led those men to form a death squad and gun down their neighbors with chilling brutality.

Authorities on Saturday night charged the mayor of this mountain community with murder, also alleging that he provided the weapons used to slaughter 45 villagers and then tried to cover up the killings. Jacinto Arias Cruz and 23 supporters from villages near the Maya hamlet of Acteal were formally charged with homicide, causing injuries and illegal association. They were taken to a prison in the Chiapas state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez.

Despite a recent massacre in Chiapas state, a group of volunteers will travel today to the mountainous region of southern Mexico to continue building a school for Indian youth. An organizer for the Chiapas School Construction Teams said the group will distribute humanitarian aid and complete at least one new classroom during their weeklong visit. "Yes, we are afraid," Project Director Peter Brown said. "But we feel we have to go there."

Roman Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz sought Thursday to console the people of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas with a Christmas message that grappled with this week's massacre of 45 unarmed villagers. But the cleric, who is one of Mexico's best-known religious figures and a champion of the rights of indigenous people in this impoverished region, also didn't disguise his anger over the relentless bloodshed in his diocese as he buried the dead.

As federal investigators scoured the killing fields in this tiny town for evidence, the Christmas lights still flickered Wednesday above the nativity scene in the deserted chapel where villagers were praying two days earlier when gunmen descended and killed 45 people.

Dozens of gunmen fired on churchgoers who were praying for peace in a remote Mexican village, killing at least 45 people--including 14 children and a baby--in a brutal escalation of the 4-year-old conflict in the southern state of Chiapas, officials confirmed Tuesday.

Investigators probing the brutal slaying of a prominent author and her family said Friday that revenge--by drug traffickers or personal enemies--is among the possible motives for a crime that has shocked the Mexican capital.