Mexico moves against Chiapas paramilitary bands

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (Reuters) -- Some 1,000 federal police officers launched an offensive Sunday against right-wing armed groups charged with the 1997 massacre of 45 Tzotzil Indians in troubled Chiapas state and other violence, police said.

The operation, headed by a special anti-paramilitary unit of the attorney general's office, went to the heart of the conflict zone in the southern Mexican highlands around the colonial city of San Cristobal de Las Casas.

Troops in 100 vehicles arrived at dawn in and around Chenalho, an indigenous city near Acteal and the site of clashes between leftist Zapatista rebels and right-wing armed bands that have been linked to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), police said.

Chiapas, one of Mexico's poorest and most heavily indigenous states, has been the scene of sporadic violence since the Zapatistas rose up in arms for Indian rights on New Year's Day 1994.

The Mexican government has identified at least 16 armed bands sowing terror in the region and has vowed to disarm them.

Some 6,000 refugees uprooted from their homes by the conflict, many driven out by paramilitary bands, live in makeshift communities in the highland communities around San Cristobal, including Acteal.

On December 22, 1997, paramilitaries attacked Acteal's refugees with guns and machetes as they prayed for peace. Authorities described the attack, which left 45 Indians dead, as an act of vengeance over the death of a paramilitary member days earlier in a clash with Zapatista rebels.

Last year, 44 Tzotzil Indians were sentenced to 35 years in prison for participating in the massacre, and earlier this year a retired army general and two senior security officials were sentenced to eight years behind bars for failing to intervene in the bloodshed.

Authorities have said at least 80 more suspects in the Acteal massacre remain at large.

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