From Chiapas with Love

One of the first mistakes I made from Chiapus and love when I went to the IU was that I was able to understand people's lives as long as they learned. I learned enough - if I read sufficient books, talk to enough professors, participate in enough forums, and acquire the ability to use technical terms well, before I know It will be stronger and smarter. The next mistake I made was to decide to study Zapatistas. As I soon discovered, the movements raised around the Mexican national liberation Zapatista army were not studied, used, and can not be forgotten.

The Chiapas earthquake mainly affected the inhabitants of Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico's poorest and most aboriginal states). About 96 people died in the earthquake, 5,000 houses in Chiapas, 11,000 houses in Oaxaca were destroyed for the first century by the largest earthquake in Mexico. When it comes to the Puebla earthquake, it is smaller than the Chiapas earthquake, but it certainly is destructive and deprives many lives. Currently there are about 360 people dying from the earthquake, this number is still growing.

The Mexican Chiapas indigenous community has been fighting for hundreds of years since Spain's conquest. Mexican Indians (especially Chiapas) are considered inhumane and have historically been rejected by constitutional rights. For this and other related reasons, indigenous peoples of Chiapas suffered from hunger, lack of medical care, poverty, loss of farmland and racial discrimination during the past four centuries. In particular, most Maya people in Chiapas province are often forced to face unjust and natural human rights violations. The Zapatists deep inside the prosperous lush and fertile jungle in the southeastern part of Mexico have consistently resisted the resistance to the cheating of about 2.3 million people living and living in rural Chiapas. A decade ago, a war broke out in South Mexico on New Year 's Day in 1994.

To enter Guatemala, we first entered Central America. A four-hour bus tour from San Cristobal in Chiapas, Mexico, became 13 at Bana Hatch on the beautiful coast of Lake Atitlan. The town is over. Elsewhere in the lake, we still live in a remote district of San Marcos Village. From the small lakeside town, San Carlos, follow the river to the group of jungle lodges called Grand River Lodge. We share our original house with bats, bugs and frogs. From our porch hammock you can see that horses, pigs, cows and other animals remain in our garden. We are eating the same food everyday for almost a month. We wandered through the jungle. We went on a boat by the river into a deeper jungle. We are kneeling in the town. We witnessed taking a rodeo on a cow ring. We like every smell of it!