Meanwhile, Maya Descendants Face Discrimination And Poverty

[tama]

3. Yup

Our neocolonial attitudes change very slow - but they keep on changing. A group of "western" Marxists (one of them became Subcomandante Marcos) went to jungles of Chiapas to teach locals socialism and revolution, but ended up learning from the local people and their traditions of anarchy and horizontal democracy. Mayans have never stopped resisting, see for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_Yucat%C3%A1n

of which struggles Guatemalan civil war and Zapatista uprising are more recent chapters.

Yes they are poor and victims of horrible destruction and massacres and every form of oppression by Europeans, but they are also much else.