The Other Justice : State Impunity and Maya Re-existence After the Acteal Massacre

How the Mexican state secured impunity after the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas, and how Maya survivors reimagine justice through embodied, collective practices of memory, healing, and political autonomy.

In December 1997, forty-five Tsotsil Maya, most of them women and children, were killed in a state-backed paramilitary attack in Acteal, Chiapas––one of the starkest cases of state violence in contemporary Mexico. Yet, as Claudia Chávez Argüelles shows, the counterinsurgent violence unleashed at Acteal did not end with the massacre, but continued in its aftermath as state impunity became a form of governance. Drawing on legal archives and long-term collaborative ethnographic research with survivors and their organization, Las Abejas, Chávez maps the social life of their testimonies across judicial rulings, media narratives, and academic interventions. Her analysis reveals how the state forged a racializing legal truth that discredits Indigenous survivors' ways of knowing, masks the slaughter's feminicidal dimensions, and shields state officials from accountability. Against this logic of erasure, the book traces how Las Abejas has cultivated "the Other Justice," a horizon of re-existence rooted in embodied, collective practices of memory, healing, and autonomy. Exposing the human toll of impunity and the decolonizing force of Las Abejas' struggle, The Other Justice redefines what justice can mean beyond the confines of law.