MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s Supreme Court overturned on Wednesday the convictions of nine Tzotzil Indians in connection with the 1997 massacre of 45 other Tzotzils in the southern state of Chiapas.

The justices upheld the verdicts against six other men and ordered a new trial for the 16 remaining defendants in the case, one of several to have emerged from the Acteal Massacre.

The nine men whose sentences were thrown out are expected to be released shortly from El Amate federal prison in Cintalapa, Chiapas.

Four of the five justices who heard the appeal found that the convictions of those nine defendants rested on fabricated evidence and false testimony.

But in the instance of the 16 defendants they ordered retried, the justices said the amount of valid evidence was sufficient to allow the prosecution to go forward.

The attorney representing all 31 defendants in the case, Jose Antonio Caballero, expressed disappointment that the high court didn’t overturn more of the convictions.

Even so, Caballero, who is employed by the government-funded Center for Economic Research and Teaching, said the decision helped remedy some of the deficiencies in the process.

Some 2,000 Indians marched in Chiapas three months ago to protest an earlier Supreme Court decision overturning the convictions of 20 other men accused of carrying out the Acteal Massacre.

The August march was organized by a grassroots Roman Catholic group known as Las Abejas (The Bees), to which the massacre victims belonged.

On Dec. 22, 1997, a contingent of men toting assault rifles killed 45 unarmed Las Abejas members – including 21 women and 15 children – praying inside a church in Acteal, Chiapas.

Though pacifist in philosophy, Las Abejas supported the leftist, Indian-rights agenda of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, whose January 1994 uprising brought national and international attention to the impoverished state bordering Guatemala.

After a week of minor clashes with security forces, the Zapatistas began their transformation into a political and civic movement – more or less tolerated by the government – with strongholds in isolated areas of Chiapas.

But even as the Zapatistas abandoned armed struggle, those who felt threatened by the Indian-rights movement created paramilitary groups that drove more than 12,000 indigenous people from their communities in Chiapas between 1995 and 2000.

In fact, the victims at Acteal were themselves internal refugees who had been forced from their homes elsewhere in the state.

Las Abejas, along with Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, has consistently attributed the massacre to the paramilitary outfits.

While 100 people were arrested in the case, more than half have been freed.

The head of Mexico’s independent National Human Rights Commission, Jose Luis Soberanes, praised the Supreme Court’s August decision to free 20 men serving time for the Acteal Massacre.

“We have always been conscious that the trial was badly conducted,” Soberanes said then. “They (the defendants) were Indians who didn’t even speak Spanish and they were tried without the basic guarantees.”

Taking the opposite position was the Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center, which said the defendants’ guilt was proven and that their release would signify impunity for a “crime against humanity.”

The massacre forced the resignation of Chiapas’ then-governor, Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro, and the ouster of Mexico’s interior minister, Emilio Chuayfett.

Human rights organizations said the massacre resulted from acts of both commission and omission by allies of Ruiz.

“Compelling evidence,” Amnesty International said in a 1998 statement on the Acteal bloodbath, “shows that the authorities facilitated the arming of paramilitaries who carried out the killings and failed to intervene as the savage attack continued for hours.”

Last week, the current Chiapas administration said that a special prosecutor appointed to review the case had found “new facts which prove the probable responsibility of former state and federal public servants, as well as that of civilians.” EFE