'Traditionalist Catholics' grudgingly sign accord after state officials quash their demands.

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico – Local political bosses who had voted to expel 65 Christians from a small town near here grudgingly signed an agreement yesterday to let the evangelicals stay in their homes.

Evangelical pastor and attorney Esdras Alonso Gonzalez told Compass the town bosses (caciques) of Los Pozos, 29 kilometers (18 miles) from San Cristobal, showed up here for the formal signing of the accord armed with demands that put extra conditions on the terms they verbally agreed to on February 28.

Alonso said the proposal of the caciques and other “traditionalist Catholics,” who practice a mixture of indigenous ritual and Roman Catholicism, called for the Christians to pay for religious festivals plus fines for refusing to contribute in the past. The evangelicals’ refusal to help pay for and participate in the festivals, which include drunken revelry and what they regard as idolatrous adoration of saints, was the reason the town officials voted to expel them last Dec. 23.

“The caciques’ attitude was that they wanted the brothers to sign another document obligating them to contribute funds for past festivals, and for the next festival on May 3, and pay fines they had supposedly accumulated,” Alonso said. “But the state government did not allow it.”

The signing of the agreement by the caciques and Los Pozos Catholic leaders, bosses from the municipality of Huistan (to which the Los Pozos community belongs), evangelicals and state officials at 1 p.m. came nine days after traditionalist Catholics and civil authorities destroyed a Pentecostal church building in Ollas, a community of nearby San Juan Chamula municipality, on April 14.

“They destroyed the temple in Chamula, and the government feels very obligated to maintain calm,” Alonso said. “The state government is very committed now, because it’s not in their interest that the problem expand further. They left it clear that there would be full religious freedom.”

It remains to be seen, he added, whether the Los Pozos town bosses will follow through on the accord’s stipulation that they restore water lines and electricity cut off from some evangelical families since January 30.

“The caciques signed it, but we want them to go ahead now and fulfill it,” he said. “The state government officials also signed it, we’ll see if they honor it. Now they have to respect this document.”

The agreement also calls for local authorities to restore firewood-gathering rights and resume distributing federal food aid and fertilizers they have diverted from the Tzotzil Maya Christians.

Alonso said the signing of the accord could prove to be a watershed moment in Mexican human rights in that it sets a precedent for state authority to head off conflicts before they fester into decades-old, major confrontations. He told Compass the accord does not seek religious tolerance – which unduly assumes evangelical faith by nature can only be tolerated – but rather the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.