Think Mexican

The Maya Are Alive – and Have Made Some Wise Recent Predictions

The Zapatistas foresaw the long-term dangers of globalization. So much for the idea that the Maya are a ‘thing of the past’

When the Maya indigenous peoples of southeast Mexico launched a revolution in 1994, they most certainly did not have in mind the “end of the world.” If there was, in the Zapatista imagination, a date evoking a doomsday, it would have to be January 1, 1994, the date of the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

To the Zapatistas, the enactment of economic globalization was nothing short of a “death sentence,” because they understood it could have lethal implications for the land and ancient traditions of the Mayas. On that cool winter’s day, armed with sticks, stones and very little ammunition, the Maya rebels of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) heralded a new era. But new did not mean better: the uprising did not result in the Mexican constitution fully recognizing the indigenous peoples as subjects with juridical status.

Indeed, the long-term repercussions of both economic globalization and the Maya uprising itself, were clearly foreseen by the Zapatistas, who predicted, not an end of the world, but the collapse of the western capitalist economy. Furthermore, Zapatista predictions had a certain sense of “prophecy” – with all the connotations that word has: in the sense of teaching and the sense of foretelling or anticipating. When the EZLN had stated in the first Lacandona declaration that the era of party politics was over, it was not only prophesying alternative ways of making politics – invoking direct democracy (based, incidentally, on ancient Maya traditions, and different from representative democracy), but it was, in fact, anticipating the collapse of some political institutions of western modernity.

In 1999 and 2007 the Mayan rebels’ spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, anticipated the collapse of the financial and banking systems. Indeed, the EZLN was predicting nothing less than the demise of Lehman Brothers: “companies and states will crumble in a matter of minutes, not by the storms of proletariat revolutions, but by the onslaught of financial hurricanes.” Were these words not glaringly prophetic?

If anything, the Zapatista Mayan prophecy would have been the announcement of the end of a myth: a realization echoed by the Occupy movement years later. And if myths were crumbling, Nafta marked the beginning of a new series of crises; the Zapatistas were the first truly to understand this, along with the shattering of the promises of modernity.

To the Mexican government, NAFTA had represented legitimate access to the future, a right of entry to the elite club of the emerging powerful corporate world; but, to the Zapatistas, NAFTA came to signify the beginning of a yet another long-fought historical war against colonial and neocolonial voracity. To some, the Maya represent a source of apocalyptic delusion and “a thing of the past” for tourist consumption only. But, asserting that Maya today are extinct, as many do, not only denotes grotesque ignorance and bigotry, but it is a rhetorical manoeuvre to validate their exploitation, conveniently transforming them into cheap labour to cater for their billionaire tourist industry.