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 1 January 1994, the date of the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
To the Zapatistas, the enactment of economic globalisation was nothing short of a "death sentence", because they understood it could have lethal implications for the land and ancient traditions of the Mayans. On that cool winter's day, armed with sticks, stones and very little ammunition, the Mayan rebels of the Frente Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) heralded a new era. But new did not mean better: the uprising did not result in the Mexican constitution fully recognising the indigenous peoples as subjects with juridical status.
Indeed, the long-term repercussions of both economic globalisation and the Mayan 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 Mayan 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 realisation 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 Mayans 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.
Today the challenges abound: from insatiable mining corporations further north of the Mayas, where the Wixárika Huicholes are fighting Canadian mining companies, to emerging Chinese or Russian clusters positioning themselves in the hegemonic dispute for the tourist industry, in the Yucatan Peninsula and "Riviera Maya". What seems imminent is the battle for both, the monopoly and exclusive access to the legacy of tangible culture (archaeological sites) and intangible culture (astronomical, botanical and linguistic knowledge), whereby the patenting of the ancient Maya legacy, including its precious, complex and unique hieroglyphic writing, is sought after – along with the genetic-patenting of the rich biodiversity in the region, a phenomenon now commonly known as "biopiracy".
Further south, significant efforts have been made in recent years to improve the situation of the Mayans of Chiapas – with the latest administration introducing plans to tackle poverty, as part of the UN millennium development goals. But there are serious concerns about their efficiency and legitimacy, not least because the government failed to observe both international and national provisions concerning their obligation to consult the Mayan natives about the destiny of the natural resources in their land.
While the federal investment for the indigenous peoples has more than doubled in the last few years, its impact, in terms of poverty reduction, has not been felt across the indigenous communities. A recent report by the Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (Coneval) showed that, while extreme and moderate poverty in 2010 affected 46.2% of the total population, its impact on the indigenous population was 79.3%.
If the ancient Mayan civilisation perished in the face of a climate catastrophe (as an increasing number of scientists tend to agree that it did), the preservation of today's Mayans lies in protecting their natural resources from manmade climate disasters, provoked by the exploitation and privatisation of their communally owned land. No "end of the world", then, just the world of the Mayans of today, who continue to be part of a great civilisation that refuses to die.