and so the Mayans

Pretending to understand the fortune of the Maya from behind a computer screen is arrogant. Even further, I am a white descendant of the very people that brought so many indigenous cultures to their knees in a fury of conquest in the name of the Lord God, but the obvious repression and slowly nurtured mistreatment of the Mayan people throughout Guatemala, Belize, and Southern Mexico is unavoidable. Understanding the depth of the problem is next to impossible without and though you may disagree with where I stand on the situation, at least give it a thought.
As we, (the lovely Christina and myself) have traveled through the jungles of the Mayan sun, illuminated by violent red blooms through the canopy of trees and echoing with the calls of rare toucans and finches, the tiny cement blasted indigenous villages where the Mayan people have been tossed into the country side whisper injustice with slow persistence. And according to a great variety of local thinkers who we have met, the shame many Mayan descendants now feel for being part of their once proud race is staggering. Most refuse to speak their native tongues and even those who do, their children refuse to speak it because at school they are looked down upon by peers and scolded by teachers. With the slow death of language follows the slow death of culture. Though In certain areas the Mayan traditions are still practiced and the many languages passed down are vibrant and alive as ever, they are still few and far between and furthermore representation for the Mayan descendants by the Mayan descendants in the Guatemalan government (as well as Belize and Mexico, but Guatemala is the most heavily concentrated) is virtually non-existent.

So why are things the way they are for the indigenous people of Guatemala?

In 1954 the United States CIA funded and backed a coup in Guatemala to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the popular democratically elected President. The reason for the coup rallied around the fact that Jacobo´s "government put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants, that the U.S. intelligence community deemed Communist in nature and, suspecting Soviet influence, fueled a fear of Guatemala becoming what Allen Dulles described as a "Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere". Dulles' concern reverberated within the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, in the context of the anti-Communist fears of the McCarthyist era. Arbenz instigated sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based multinational company United Fruit Company, which had large stakes in the old order of Guatemala and lobbied various levels of U.S. government officials to take action against Arbenz. Both Dulles and his brother were shareholders of United Fruit Company."

Still what's the point of all this?
Well, the fruit plantations are obviously in rural areas, as are all farms of size. Ironically so is the majority of Guatemalas population. And in a further coincidence, the Mayan descendants make up most of Guatemalas population. What better employees than cheap Indians who are familiar with low wages and don´t mind the sun on their dark skin?
The sizable rural population is directly linked to the historically large indigenous (Amerindian) presence in Guatemala; persons descended from the Mayan Indians account for 56 percent of the nation's total population, making Guatemala the Latin American nation with the largest indigenous population relative to total population. The Mayans were never conquered by the Spanish, but rather were already dispersed to small rural populations when the conquistadors arrived. Even over the hundreds of years since the arrival of the Spanish, the scattered indigenous tribes of Guatemala were extremely difficult to round up and Christianize, and the Spanish were content breeding with the remaining indigenous urbanites, thus leaving the rural population to become an exploited workforce of the society's land owning aristocrats. Today most of the Mayan descended population are either field workers or market vendors in tourist centers. This means cheap fruits and coffee from Guatemala available in the U.S. are grown on the backs and watered by the sweat of underpaid indigenous "Guatemalan" citizens. Your local grocer most likely doesn't have a sticker explaining this system of labor to put on the bananas though. The indigenous people of the country were never given a chance to assimilate or fight against Spanish culture in any organized way. The other 44 percent of the national population is consequently mestizo (of mixed Amerindian-Spanish descent, also called ladino in local Spanish). Traditionally throughout Latin America, ladino means nothing more than an Indian who lost his way and took up Spanish tradition. It seems the Spanish simply came to settle down and over time became a callous breed of half Indians without any sense of historical identity, but rather an unyielding obsession with impressing themselves by creating a mediocre bourgeois full of crass ignorance to the history of the land they call Guatemala and home. It seems no surprise then that despite the the concentration of the population in rural areas, close to 80 percent of physicians are located in the metropolitan area, making health care difficult to access for rural inhabitants. Additionally, water supply and sanitation services reach 92 percent and 72 percent of the urban population respectively, while in rural areas they reach marginally more than 50 percent of the population.

All of these sadly unsurprising facts echo the Guatemalan civil war that stretched on from just after the coup in the year 1960 to 1996. Strangely enough the war was fought and dragged out over the very issues of human civil rights and strengthening the rights of the country´s peasantry. And still today, though Guatemala fronts itself as a democratic country offering equality for all, Guatemala's political legacy is one of authoritarian governments often owned by, and dominated by the oligarchy that makes up about 2% of the country, yet controls 65% of the land. Throughout most of Guatemala's post-colonial history, external political opposition was simply not possible and as a result small covert revolutionary movements grew within the political infrastructure. Armed guerilla movements have been a political presence since the 1960's. In 1982 many small Guerrilla factions joined to form the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG).

So where do the great Mayan descendants stand in all of this? Most of them can be seen walking up and down mountain roads with 100 lbs load of firewood draped over their backs, strapped by a leather strap to their foreheads. And as far as I can see, the hope that dwindles between their cultural abandonment and cultural exploitation into tours of ancient ruins and tourist-bought textiles is small and meek. But one candle can light an entire room. Perhaps someday, with some kind of political backing from the United States, the Mayans could live proud again as they once did as the strongest indigenous force in all of Central America. I suppose it´s enough to arouse second thoughts the next time you buy a bunch of bananas.