Members of the paramilitary group Máscara Roja (“Red Masks”), aligned with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that was in power at the time, brutally murdered more than forty Indigenous Tzotzil people, including twenty-one women and fifteen children, from the villages of Acteal, Los Chorros, Pechquil, and Yabtelum in the Mexican state of Chiapas on December 22, 1997. The victims, members of a Roman Catholic pacifist group named Las Abejas (“The Bees”) that sympathized with Zapatista rebels challenging the PRI, were assembled in a chapel in Acteal to pray for safe deliverance after having been forced from their homes by the Máscara Roja, who demanded they either join the group or be killed.