16°59′16″N 92°31′07″W / 16.98778°N 92.51861°W
Acteal is a small village in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, about 20 km north of San Cristóbal de las Casas. It became known internationally at the end of 1997 for the massacre of 45 indigenous people.
The Chiapas conflict (Spanish: Conflicto de Chiapas) consisted of the 1994 Zapatista uprising, the 1995 Zapatista crisis, and the subsequent tension between the Mexican state, the Indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers of Chiapas from the 1990s to the 2010s.
The Zapatista uprising started in January 1994, and lasted less than two weeks, before a ceasefire was agreed upon. The principal belligerents of subsection of the conflict were the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Spanish: Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional; EZLN) and the government of Mexico. Negotiations between the government and Zapatistas led to agreements being signed, but were often not complied with in the following years as the peace process stagnated. This resulted in an increasing division between communities with ties to the government and communities that sympathized with the Zapatistas. Social tensions, armed conflict and paramilitary incidents increased, culminating in the killing of 45 people in the village of Acteal in 1997 by an anti-Zapatista militia with ties to the Mexican government. Though at a low level, rebel activity continued and violence occasionally erupted between Zapatista supporters and anti-Zapatista militias along with the government. The last related incident occurred in 2014, when a Zapatista-affiliated teacher was killed and 15 more wounded in Chiapas. The armed conflict ended in the late 2010s.
The Acteal massacre was a massacre of 45 people attending a prayer meeting of Catholic Indigenous townspeople, including a number of children and pregnant women, who were members of the pacifist group Las Abejas ("The Bees"), in the small village of Acteal in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Right-wing paramilitary group Máscara Roja murdered the victims on December 22, 1997, while the Government of Mexico first admitted responsibility for the massacre in September 2020.