They played the leading roles. Xaw accused Catalina of having founded and perpetuated an idolatrous cult in the cave at Tzajal-hemel. With respect to the other women under arrest he could affirm only that they were her accomplices, that they had accompanied her during the ceremonies and had served her in her house “better than they would have served a patrona.”

Xaw’s declaration was made in Spanish. The Indian women did not understand the words that were condemning them and looked to the old sacristan’s familiar, everyday figure as a refuge, a hope.

The lawyer who was prosecuting the arrested women was aware that freedom of religion was a right safeguarded by the Constitution, and though he in no way approved of the exercise of that right (he was a Catholic who regarded intransigence as a bulwark of the faith), he preferred to view the matter in another light that was just as effective in predisposing his listeners’ minds against the accused women: a political light. These meetings, he said, which under the pretext of worshiping false gods took place in the cave at Tzajal-hemel, hid a much more dangerous intention, the intention the Chamulas had never given up: to rebel against the Ladinos of Ciudad Real.

The moment, the lawyer added, was favorable. Recently, the whole region had been agitated by the presidential decrees ordering that the property titles of the great haciendas be reviewed in order to reduce their boundaries to the limits set by the law and grant land to the ejidos by that means. This project, which while just (the lawyer did not wish to question the good intentions or the skill of the officials who held supreme power in the country), was also untimely and imprudent, should have had its implementation entrusted only to the most suitable hands. Unfortunately that was not the case in Ciudad Real; a person was appointed as executor of the agrarian policy, a person whose name the lawyer would not pronounce but it was in everyone’s mind. A person who, far from reconciling warring interests, had systematically dedicated himself to making things worse by placing himself openly against the ranchers and stirring up the Indians by preaching equality and the recovery of their land to them.