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Janurary 17, 2001 People On The Edge Maya of Yucatán and Chiapas Photo Essay & Reporting by John Annerino
"We brought out our guns and made indiscriminate
war. One monster, twenty–five or thirty feet long , lay on the arm of a
gigantic tree –but the whole of the alligator was visible. I hit him just
under the white line; he fell off, and with a tremendous convulsion, reddening
the water with a circle of blood, turned over on his back, dead."
John L. Stephens, 1841 Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán
In the somber afternoon light of the selva, men emerge from shadows. A rolling bank of storm clouds heralds rain and perhaps appeasement for the nucuch–chacob, "powerful gods." But rusty single–barrel shotguns lashed to battered bicycles and burlap sacks stuffed with the furred and feathered carcasses of small birds and animals tell another story. These desperate Yucatec Maya hunters have been stalking the jungles of Yucatán for sian ka'an, "everything that was born under the sky," before the jungle life closes forever on one of Mexico's greatest peoples. The arrival of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortes in the port city of Veracruz in 1519, and his ruthless matanza (slaughter) of the Aztec civilization two years later, had a  |
