Chiapas: The Martyrs of Acteal

December 22, 1997. People wrap up their Christmas shopping and soak up the holiday glow. In Mexico, a paramilitary death squad armed with machine guns and machetes slaughters forty-five defenseless Mayan Indians, mostly women and children, as they pray for peace in a makeshift chapel near their refugee camp in the village of Acteal, Chiapas.

Around Christmas the year-long spirit of political apathy rises to the point where it is stifling. "It's a time for happiness and celebration", "It's about family and coming together", "It's about giving". And this is partly true. But Christmas was the calm before the storm. Following Jesus' birth a jealous ruler would unleash a massacre on the children of his own subjects in Bethlehem. I'm not a fan of the 'shut up and shop' mentality at the best of times and be ye warned, this post is a million miles from visions of sugar plums and jolly fat red men.

Someone penned this poem in response to the massacre in Acteal, I think it's beautiful:

Christmas in Chiapas

The Emperor decrees:

Turn the uppity Indians out.
Torch their homes.
Line up the men
on the basketball courts
and beat their faces
into the concrete
with rifle butts.

But that is not enough
for the money-maddened
mercenaries.

So they follow the homeless
into the mountains,
where they find the
women and children
on the dirt floor
of a clapboard church,
beseeching their God
for deliverance.

There they loose their
automatic assault rifle fire,
blow a newborn to shreds
in its mother’s hands,
mow down the fleeing father
with a toddler under each arm,
crashing through the brush
to the river,
already running red.

Never hungry again,
a little girl of four
falls machete-blessed;
A bloody cross
parts her face
in prophecy.

But Herod
on his rampage
cannot stop the child
being born.

Village to village,
around the world,
the word becomes flesh.

From Acteal,
an angel brings the news:

Maria,
expecting mother,
though mortally wounded,
has given birth,
and called her child
Emmanuel.

God with us.

This event has apparently been instumental in shaping the Zapatista resistance in Chiapas and encouraged a shift away from armed struggle towards peacemaking:

Here the bloodied soil of Acteal has more to tell. The forty-five victims, members of a nonviolent Christian group called Las Abejas (The Bees), knew their attackers were coming. When warned, they chose to stay and pray. Like the Zapatistas, they knew that peace would cost lives, that “people will have to die so those coming after can live.” They chose to offer their own lives, not in armed struggle, but as a redemptive sacrifice.

Words fail in light of such sacrifice. This is the violence of peace, the example Jesus left us, the way of the greatest resistors of our time. The martyrs of Acteal join the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Oscar Romero. They fight with weapons the powerful cannot match or even comprehend.

For my money it is losing sight of this kind of inspirational approach that has crippled the Western Left.

I highly recommend the full article.

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