Paramilitaries have gunned down up to 46 unarmed Maya Indian men, women and children and wounded 25 more in Mexico's troubled southern state of Chiapas, witnesses said yesterday. One local official called it the worst bloodbath since the 1994 Zapatista Indian rebel uprising in the state.
About 60 heavily armed paramilitaries attacked the remote Chiapas mountain village of Acteal about 450 miles south-east of Mexico City, just before midday on Monday, firing automatic weapons indiscriminately, survivors said.
The Red Cross confirmed a figure of 45, mostly women and children, dead. Later a Chiapas state official said the figure was 46.
"This is an absolute outrage, I don't know how many more dead there will be in this war," said Father Gonzalo Ituarte Icario, secretary of Mexico's National Commission for Mediation (CONAI) in Chiapas.
The federal government in Mexico City and the state government in Chiapas were unable to provide any immediate official information or comment on the attack.
Chiapas hospitals were overwhelmed as doctors struggled to cope with the flood of injured.
Witnesses said the scene in the Salubridad clinic in the Chiapas hill town of San Cristobal de las Casas - the nearest main centre to Acteal - was "Dantesque", with the blood of the dying everywhere and corridors filled with the cries of women and children.
The hospital director, Mr Francisco Millan Velasco, said that at least 13 people had been brought in with bullet wounds, including a comatose four-year-old girl whose skull was shattered by a dum-dum bullet.
The motive for the attack was not immediately clear but there have been violent clashes in recent weeks in the area around Chenalho between paramilitaries backed by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Indian supporters of the Zapatistas.
At the end of November, several thousand Indians fled to the mountains around Chenalho, braving cold and hunger to escape a wave of paramilitary and police violence that claimed at least 10 lives. Some reports said the Acteal villagers were celebrating Mass when the attack began and many people sought refuge in schools and a local church.
"This is the worst massacre that has occurred in Chiapas since the uprising of 1994," said Mr Domingo Perez Pacencia, president of the town council in the proZapatista municipality of Chenalho, which administers the area including Acteal.
"This is unspeakable, an armed attack against defenceless civilians, most of them refugees from the political violence unleashed in the municipality during the last two months," said Ms Patricia Marina, of the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Centre for Human Rights in San Cristobal.
Some reports said the victims were supporters of Chiapas's Zapatista rebels, who burst onto the national stage on January 1st, 1994 with a violent uprising against the Mexican government in which at least 140 people died.
Waves of paramilitary violence have swept the state since then as gunmen accused of being backed by landowners and local politicians have sought to punish villagers for their support of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).
A local resident, Mr Javier Jimenez Luna, said that the massacre was planned by PRI paramilitaries from three villages.
"They agreed to attack the bases of support for the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Acteal," he said.
The government agreed to a ceasefire with the rebels to allow peace negotiations. The talks broke down in September 1996 after the Zapatistas accused the authorities of reneging on their promises and tension has been steadily rising in the state in recent months. Previous attacks in northern Chiapas have been blamed on a landowners' paramilitary group, Peace and Justice.