Just before Christmas, 1997, 45 unarmed refugees were murdered by a paramilitary group in the village of Acteal in Chiapas, Mexico. The Acteal Massacre occurred at the height of the "low-intensity war," a wave of violence and militarization that began in Chiapas after the Zapatista indigenous guerrilla uprising of 1994. Those killed at Acteal belonged to Las Abejas, a Catholic pacifist organization that rejected the Zapatistas' use of violence but sympathized with their demands. Since 2009, the Mexican Supreme Court has released 54 of the paramilitaries who were jailed for the massacre on the basis of procedural errors.
In 2013, wartime divisions began to resurface in Colonia Puebla, a town close to Acteal. That March, a dispute over a plot of land owned by the Catholic church led to escalating aggression against the community's Catholic minority - many of whom are members of Las Abejas - and within months, nearly a hundred of them had fled for their lives. They spent the following year living as displaced persons in Acteal, taken in by the Abejas leadership and survivors of the 1997 massacre, who feared that history was about to repeat itself.
