For a map, click here. A hat tip to Animal Politico for additional details
By Chris Covert
Former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon was named in a lawsuit filed Friday in a Connecticut federal district court by victims of a massacre that took place in December, 1997 in Mexico according to various English and Spanish language sources.
The lawsuit names ten plaintiffs, four females and six males under the pseudonym John and Jane Doe, all of whom either lost relatives or were killed in the Acteal massacre in Acteal, Chiapas on December 17, 1997.
Zedillo is the sole defendant in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Zedillo gave the orders to, and trained and armed the paramilitary forces who shot or hacked to death 45 men women and children who were attending a prayer service.
The suit also says Zedillo committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Chiapas during his term in office which ended in December 2000.
According to a report by the Mexican leftist weekly Proceso, 34 individuals were convicted of the massacre in 2007, and each given 26 years in prison.
In 2009, however, all but 14 were released because of prosecutorial misconduct including manufacturing evidence.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory, punitive and exemplary damages as well as attorney fees and costs.
Zedillo characterized the charges in the lawsuit as "false and slanderous", in a statement released to CNN Tuesday evening.
Zedillio is currently a professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and director of the Center for the Study of Globalization at the school.
One of the stranger aspects of the lawsuit mentions Mexican Army plans to counter the Marxist-inspired Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) in Chiapas, known as the Plana Campana Chiapas '94, the existence of which was denied by the Mexican government until a leaked copy was published in the Mexican leftist daily La Jornada in 1998.
The document sets a broad outline for countering EZLN in four distinct phases, and it is set as exhibit one in the lawsuit.
The reason why mentioning the document is strange is that the document can't have any materials about the Acteal massacre, so it cannot be directly related to the issue at hand. It was a broad strategic outline, much of which was taken straight from US experiences and doctrine in dealing with hostile armed insurrection.
The lawsuit alleges in its brief explication of the military document that it violated Mexican law, which is very unlikely as Chiapas was in the throes of a violent Marxist war against ordinary Mexican citizens.
The lawsuit alleges that Zedillo terminated the process, oddly enough, because of the 1995 debt crisis, without mentioning the EZLN had already violated the peace accords and was very much active in sowing terror throughout the state with its supporters, armed and otherwise. Those acts are well documented in a Mexican government report released later that decade.
The government white paper on the numerous incidents by EZLN and their supporters is not mentioned in the lawsuit.
The rise of the EZLN in late 1994 inspired the reigniting of a number of armed hostile revolutionary groups in southern Mexican states starting in 1995.
It may well be the only thing Zedillo is guilty of is defending his country against armed aggression.