382 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
World People—indigenous inhabitants of old European colonial societies—are re-
sponding to the post-Cold War Era all over the world. (We are grateful to Duncan M.
Earle for his help and critical commentary on the introductory section to this
chapter.)CONTEXTS WITHIN WHICH
THE MOVEMENT HAS EMERGED
The Current World Context
The late 1980s and early 1990s brought a sense of euphoria in the West. We had won
the Cold War. The collapse of communism, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the
destruction of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of democratic societies in Eastern Eu-
rope, all brought a sense glorious closure, that the West had achieved what Francis
Fukuyama (1992) famously called “the end of history,” by which he implied that, at
last, representative democracy and capitalism had triumphed in the epic conflict of
good and evil. The ensuing civil wars in the Balkan peninsula, Sri Lanka, and Timor
quickly dispelled this image. It became evident that the end of the Cold War had in
fact unleashed pent-up aspirations for ethnic affirmation and self-determination that
had been long suppressed by the East-West conflict. In fact, the end of the Cold War
marked the end of the colonial era, in which two variants of the same theme—
European hegemony, Soviet and Western—were dispatched forever, only to be sup-
planted by a remarkable array of new players and new aspirants to power. Among
these players were the Mayas of Mexico and Central America.
The unexpected paradox of Fukuyama’s presumed homogenization of world
economic systems and political systems on the one hand and the reality of new eth-
nic resurgence and balkanization all over the world on the other was of course made
manifest with the disappearance of barriers such as the Iron Curtain that were in-
tended to prohibit free movement of people. The end of the Cold War unleashed un-
precedented migration and immigration, as people found themselves able to move
freely in search of economic opportunity and communities of like-minded ethnic
compatriots.
Also essential for understanding the new ethnic affirmation (and its extreme ex-
pression in the current world trend toward political and religious fundamentalism)
is the unprecedented ease and immediacy of communication and the flow of infor-
mation via the World Wide Web and the Internet. This new technology both facili-
tates globalization (as, for example, in making it possible to conduct international
business transactions and diplomatic communications almost instantly) and thwarts
it (as, for example, the clandestine maintenance of the Al Qaeda terrorist network).
As this pertains to the discussion of the Mayan Zapatista Movement, the Web has
been absolutely central to its funding, maintenance, public communication, even
its survival.
Forty years ago, an insurrection such as the one that the Zapatistas launched on
January 1, 1994, would have been put down violently by the Mexican Army. All of the
hamlets that supported them would have been burned and destroyed, and the Za-