11. 45 people were murdered in the Acteal Massacre, three days before Christmas Day 1997
The politics behind this ghastly event are pretty complicated – one Mexican lecturer described the massacre as ‘the most complicated case in Mexico’ – but here’s an inadequate summary. The small and impoverished village of Acteal, Mexico, was home Las Abejas (‘the bees’), a religious collective that sympathized with a rebel group opposing the Mexican government. Thus, on December 22nd 1997, members of the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party crept down the steep hill slopes above the village. They chose their moment to attack carefully: when they finally slunk into Acteal, people were gathered at a prayer meeting.
Over the next few hours, assassins armed with guns executed 45 innocent people in cold blood. Amongst the dead were 21 women, some of whom were pregnant, and 15 children. Worst of all, investigations into this cowardly act seem to implicate the government itself. Soldiers garrisoned nearby did not intervene, despite being within earshot of the gunfire and horrified screams, and there was evidence of the crime scene being tampered with by local police and government officials. Though some people have been convicted, there are suspicions that they were framed, and that the real culprits remain at large.