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Explanation
Mexico is one of the many Latin American countries where the
status of the indigenous inhabitants, and their relation with
the descendants of the Iberian colonisers is still not resolved.
As the urban elites become rich from the privatisation of
the formerly state owned assets, and as the NAFTA
trade agreement lets imports from the United States and Canada
into the country, the poor feel their exclusion from the modern
economy.
The communally owned villages of the Mayan area are exposed
to the dangers of privatisation and confiscation by the powerful.
Thus this conflict contains many themes both ancient and modern
and includes the endemic quasi- feudalism
of the area, as well as the threatened influence of American
style capitalism.
In the southern State of Chiapas there has been a rising of
Mayan peasants in the name of Emiliano Zapata, one of the revolutionaries
of the early Mexican Revolution, demanding greater democracy
in their area - threatened by the endemic corruption of officials
of the Mexican state, and the long hegemony of the single party
(Institutional Revolutionary Party) whose long reign was broken
by a pro-US party the National Action Party.
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