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devastating rippling affect. Conquistadors, following Cortes' lead, dealt a crippling blow to the neighboring Maya and to indigenous people elsewhere throughout Mexico. Driven into the depths of genocide and despair by a four–century long process of Hispanization, these people began to vanish. Of the more than 200 indigenous groups that thrived throughout Mexico in prehispanic times, an estimated 140 indigenous languages were lost by the 19th century. With the loss of
Suguaro Cactus
language, cultural extinction followed. Of the fifty–seven indigenous groups still recognized by Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute), the Maya account for ten distinct groups that comprise Mexico's surviving indigenous peoples; those ten groups include the Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Lacandón, and Yucatec Maya. Although these Maya comprise an indigenous population estimated to be 11 million people, their numbers have brought almost no protection; many have joined the ranks of 30 million other poverty-stricken Mexicanos. Driven from ancestral lands by fraud, narco colonialism, environmental destruction, the recent rollback of once protective ejido laws, and an exploding Mestizo population, more than 1 million desperate Indians reportedly live in the streets and ramshackle colonias of the country's bustling cities from Mexico City to Tijuana.

The Maya have not escaped the terrible fate of their paisanos (countrymen) which has haunted them since first being cursed by Spanish plagues and the ordenanza of 1552 that forbade aboriginal practices, religious rites, and