A United Nations truth commission concluded that such atrocities constituted acts of genocide. In many instances, the Guatemalan military justified its actions by depicting the Maya as savages, much in the same way Gibson does in Apocalypto.
Still the Maya endure.
But another apocalypse looms before them, as international institutions try to fix what they paint as the economic "backwardness" of the Maya region.
Since NAFTA's implementation in 1994, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers, many of them Maya, have lost their livelihoods as a result of corn dumping by highly subsidized U.S. agribusiness cartels.
The further reduction of Mexican corn tariffs from 27 percent next month to 0 percent in 2008 will serve a final blow to the Mexican countryside. CAFTA will have similar impacts on the Central American corn market. Maya farmers displaced by both these trade agreements will likely join the steady flow of illegal Mexican immigration to the United States.
Meanwhile, in the small country of Belize, the Inter-American Development Bank has encouraged the government to reorganize its land tenure system to emphasize private leases. In response, Mayans are filing a claim before the Belize Supreme Court this month to demand customary rights to the communal lands they have farmed for generations. Unfortunately, the recent discovery of oil in Belize will probably dash Maya hopes to gain land tenure.
Across the border in Guatemala, a similar titling project financed by the World Bank is fueling land speculation in the Maya lowlands. Narco-traffickers, cattle ranchers and African palm planters are buying or simply seizing Maya properties.
The Puebla to Panama Plan, ostensibly an economic development program for Mexico and Central America, will plunder Maya lands through the construction of highways, factories, electrical grids and hydroelectric dams.
While the Maya people have shown continued resilience over centuries of conquest, these neoliberal threats to their lands and livelihoods may prove their final "apocalypto."
Both Rick Stepp and Liza Grandia are cultural anthropologists who, combined, have carried out more than two decades of research about the Maya. A native of Stone Mountain, Ga., Grandia is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and speaks Q'eqchi' Maya fluently. Stepp is an associate professor at the University of Florida.
Liza Grandia, Ph.D. is a cultural anthropologist who has lived and worked in Guatemala and Belize for over six years. She is an assistant professor of International Development and Social Change at Clark University and is currently on leave at Yale University with a postdoc fellowship in Agrarian Studies. She is an emeritus board member of ProPeten, a Guatemalan environmental organization, with whom she has worked since 1993 (www.propeten.org). Liza speaks Q'eqchi' Maya and Spanish fluently.
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