Las Abejas drew their members from 48 indigenous communities across the highlands of Chiapas. They shared the social justice goals of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation -- the EZLN -- but explicitly rejected violence. Their activism took the form of fasting, prayer, and communiques denouncing the conflicts that had consumed Chiapas since the Zapatista uprising of 1994. That commitment to nonviolence made them no less of a target. Many believe it was precisely their affiliation with the Zapatista cause that marked the people of Acteal. The paramilitary forces that carried out the attack had links to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, and the question of government complicity has haunted the case ever since. Some of the pregnant women were deliberately attacked to kill their unborn children -- a detail that speaks to the cruelty of what was not merely a political act but an attempt to destroy a community and its future.

The aftermath unfolded in a pattern familiar to survivors of state-linked violence in Latin America: allegations of stalled investigations, reluctance to question suspects, and institutional resistance to accountability. The EZLN and many Chiapas residents accused the PRI of direct complicity. After the change of government in 2000, survivors said the investigation was being deliberately obstructed, with authorities refusing to arrest identified suspects. In 2007, a federal judge sentenced 18 people to 40 years each for their roles in the massacre. But the Supreme Court later reopened the case after multiple organizations documented serious gaps in how evidence had been handled. In 2014, survivors filed a case in the United States against former President Ernesto Zedillo, who held office at the time of the killings, but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it on grounds of sovereign immunity. In 2015, Las Abejas testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

It was not until September 2, 2020, that the Mexican state formally acknowledged what the survivors had always known. Alejandro Encinas Rodriguez, Undersecretary for Human Rights, stood before the families and offered a public apology on behalf of the government, admitting that the state bore responsibility for the massacre. The admission came after years of pressure from survivors who had requested a Truth Commission in December 2018, shortly after President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office. The government announced twenty actions to repair the damage, including recognition that the paramilitary forces had been linked to the state and the PRI. A Friendly Settlement Agreement provided funding for infrastructure projects in the region and was signed by thirty collateral victims of the massacre. The agreement also ended the lawsuit that victims had pursued before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. For 45 people at prayer in a highland village, justice came in the form of words spoken more than two decades later.

Acteal is still a small village in the misty highlands of Chiapas, where the mountains rise steeply and clouds settle in the valleys. Las Abejas continues its work, its commitment to nonviolence unbroken by the violence inflicted upon it. In November 2006, one hundred men and one hundred women from the group organized a peace and justice caravan to Oaxaca, delivering three tons of food, water, and medicine to the Popular Assembly of the Oaxacan People during a period of government repression there. The name Las Abejas was chosen because bees work collectively, produce something sweet, and defend themselves only when their hive is threatened. The 45 people killed on December 22, 1997 -- the mothers, the children, the unborn -- are commemorated by a community that chose, and continues to choose, peace. Their names are not footnotes. They are the reason the village of Acteal is remembered, and the reason the word accountability still carries weight in the highlands of Chiapas.