Six killed at Chinkultic archealogical site occupation in Chiapas, Mexico

This community is not Zapatista and they don't have any political claim - they're local. They just asked to be able to take part in managing the archaeological site, which is currently managed by the National Institute of Archaeology - probably corrupt like the majority of similar state institutes in Mexico.

According to my sources there, the police stopped a car that was taking injured Indians to the hospital, and killed them. This kind of incident happens often in Mexico. The local media don't mention it because there's no clear political message. The Indians protest and are repressed by the police which are brutal and badly guided. The police functions according to methods inherited from the PRI [the Institutional Revolutionary Party], who managed the country in a very authoritarian way between the 1930s and 2000. Even the Chiapas state governor said that there had been a blunder and that it must be investigated.

Vázquez aseguró que tres de las víctimas fueron "rematadas" por los policías cuando era llevadas en un vehículo para ser atendidas de sus heridas en un hospital.

Dijo que la Policía le hizo alto al conductor y abrió fuego contra los tres heridos y el hombre que iba al volante, por lo que en ese lugar quedaron cuatro personas muertas.

Los otros dos murieron de bala cuando eran trasladados a la comunidad de Aguatinta porque no pudieron llegar a un hospital de la ciudad de Comitán, dijo el portavoz.

Mexican police on Friday shot and killed six peasants during and after an operation to end the popular occupation of an archealogical tourist site near Miguel Hidalgo, Chiapas.

The site at Chinkultic had been occupied by members of its surrounding villages since 7 September, following what villagers saw as its neglect by the INAH (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) - the state institution charged with maintaining the country's thousands of ruins sites - and the concentration of profits from tourism in the municipality (one of the poorest in Mexico) outside of its inhabitants.

The municipality of La Trinitaria, which encompasses Miguel Hidalgo and Chinkultic, ranks as one of the very poorest in Mexico. Some days before the successful eviction of the occupiers on Friday, villagers had successfully apprehended, detained and disarmed some 77 policemen sent to arrest the occupation's "ringleaders".

Although the deaths were written off by the state and federal police as an unfortunate necessity of the rescue of their officers, weapons and the site itself, evidence is now beginning to surface of some of the deaths happening a long way from Chinkultic and following its return to the police.

La Jornada today quotes Eloísa Margarita Espinosa Morales, a woman who was travelling with her husband in his pickup truck carrying injured villagers from Miguel Hidalgo towards the nearest hospital in Comitán (some 40km away). A police roadblock detained them several kilometres up the road and although they stated the intention of their journey, the police told them to "get down on the ground, you dogs!" before taking Morales' husband into wasteland and firing seven fatal bullets into him.

"You don't mess with the government, you idiots", the police told the truck's passengers. When Morales protested her innocence, she was robbed of her jewlry and told to "shut up if you don't want to die like those fools".