Chiapas

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Chiapas

Location

Statistics
Capital	Tuxtla Gutiérrez
Area	74,211 km² Ranked 8th
Population (2005 census)	4,293,459 Ranked 7th
HDI (2004)	0.7076 - medium Ranked 32nd
Governor (2006-2012)	Juan José Sabines Guerrero (PRD)
Federal Deputies	PRI: 7 PRD: 5
Federal Senators	PRI: 1 PRD: 1 PVEM: 1
ISO 3166-2 Postal abbr.	MX-CHP Chis.

Chiapas is a state in the southeast of Mexico. Chiapas is bordered by the states of Tabasco to the north, Veracruz to the northwest, and Oaxaca to the west. To the east Chiapas borders Guatemala, and to the south the Pacific Ocean.

Chiapas has an area of 73,887 km² (28,528 square miles). The 2005 census population was 4,293,459 people.

In general Chiapas has a humid, tropical weather. In the north, in the area bordering Tabasco, near Teapa, rainfall can average more than 3,000 mm/year. Natural vegetation at this region was lowland, tall perennial rainforest, but this vegetation has been destroyed almost completely for agriculture and ranching. Rainfall decreases moving towards the Pacific Ocean, but it is still abundant enough to allow the cultivation of bananas and many other tropical crops near Tapachula. On the several parallel sierras or mountain ranges running along the center of Chiapas, climate can be quite temperate and foggy, allowing the development of cloud forests like those of the Reserva de la Biosfera el Triunfo, home to a handful of quetzals and horned guans.

The state capital city is Tuxtla Gutiérrez; other cities and towns in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las Casas, Comitán, and Tapachula. Chiapas is also home to the ancient Maya ruins of Palenque, Yaxchilan, Bonampak, Chinkultic, and Tonina.

Many of the people in Chiapas are poor, rural small farmers. About one quarter of the population are of full or predominant Maya descent, and in rural areas many do not speak Spanish. The state suffers from the highest rate of malnutrition in Mexico, estimated to affect over 40% of the population.

Other social issues involve the increasing presence of the Central American gangs known as Maras, and illegal immigration from Central America in general, mostly directed towards the United States, but further aggravating the panorama of local poverty. This floating influx of people is frequently subject to abuse and human rights violations from Mexican authorities.

In 1994, there was an outbreak of violence between the Mexican Government and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (the EZLN or Zapatistas). Today, the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, named in honour of Emiliano Zapata) has rejected the use of force and seek to be recognized as a voice of the disenfranchised. There are currently 32 "rebel autonomous zapatista municipalities" (independent Zapatista communities, MAREZ in Spanish), controlled by the EZLN in Chiapas: examples of these communities are Ocosingo and Las Margaritas.

1 History of Chiapas
2 Demographics
3 Murals
4 Landmarks
5 Municipalities
6 Major communities
7 Notes
8 References
9 External links

[edit] History of Chiapas

[edit] Pre-Columbian

Chiapa de Corzo (Mesoamerican site), in the center of Chiapas, shows evidence of periodic occupations throughout pre-history, and evidence of continual occupation since 1400 BCE. The oldest Maya Long Count date yet discovered, equivalent to December 36 BCE in the Gregorian calendar, was found on one of several monument shards there.

In approximately 800 CE, Mangue-speaking Chiapaneca peoples from the north conquered the native Zoque and Maya towns. The mounds and plazas at Chiapas de Corvo date to approximately 700 BCE with the temple and palace constructed during the Late Formative, perhaps 400 BCE to 200 CE.^[1]

The Maya city of Palenque was founded in the early Pre-classic, with the first large structures constructed around 600 CE.

[edit] History through the 19th century

Chiapas was conquered by Spain in the early 16th century, and became part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, administered as part of the "Kingdom of Guatemala" (what is now Central America), administered from Antigua Guatemala.

When Central America achieved its independence from Mexico in 1823, western Chiapas was annexed to Mexico. More of current day Chiapas was transferred after the disintegration of the Central American Federation in 1842, and the remainder of the current state taken from Guatemala in the early 1880s by President Porfirio Díaz.

Chiapas remained one of the parts of Mexico least affected by change, with the descendants of the Spanish continuing to exercise much control over the native peoples through such institutions as debt peonage, despite attempts by the central government to abolish those practices.

In 1868 there was an armed native rebellion, led by the Tzotzil Maya as well as Tzeltal, Tojolabal, and Ch'ol; it almost succeeded in taking San Cristóbal, then the state capital, before it was suppressed by the Mexican army.

[edit] Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Main article: Zapatista Army of National Liberation

In the twentieth century some people in Chiapas felt that their poor and largely agricultural area had been ignored by the government since enactment of the constitution of 1917. One of the chief complaints was that many indigenous farmers were required to pay absentee landlords, despite the fact that since the 1920s the Mexican government had been promising the peasants ownership of the land they had farmed and lived on for generations. Article 27 of the 1917 constitution guaranteed indigenous peoples the right to an "ejido" or communal land. As Mexico restructured its economy after the 1982 financial crisis the state sector shrank due to privatizations and reorganization while land reform became less of a priority (it had long since been completed in most of the country, with Chiapas as a notable exception). The Mexican government under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari sought to liberalize the closed and autonomous economy and increase its openness to trade. As part of this process Mexico repealed the constitutional guarantee of communally owned ejidos for rural communities. As the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect on January 1, 1994, the indigenous peoples of Chiapas - struggling to make a living with few resources - felt increasingly left behind.

Such dissatisfaction led to the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Zapatistas, or Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), which began an armed rebellion against the federal government on January 1, 1994 as a response to the negative implications NAFTA had for the indigenous population, especially in southern Mexico. In this year, thousands of supporters of the anti-globalization movement gathered in Chiapas, and it was from this meeting that the modern movement was born.

The group is named after the iconic revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata who fought during the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s. Zapata gained enormous respect throughout Latin America for defending the rights of the poor agricultural sector of Mexico. The Zapatistas were in principle a peaceful movement that was pushed to use the force of arms to guarantee the indigenous right to ejidos. Subcomandante Marcos, the face of the Zapatistas, succeeded in attracting international attention, with the innovative use of modern information and communication technologies.

After the initial seizure of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, the Mexican army kept the Zapatistas bottled up in their rural strongholds. Sporadic armed repression by paramilitaries that appears to have been funded by local landowners, and with which elements in the federal government may have sympathized, followed. There was a series of massacres, most notably in 1997 in Acteal, where refugees from indigenous communities, mainly women and children, were killed, after a National Peace Accord had been signed.

In 2000, the EZLN renewed its revolt, declaring control of a number of villages and sending a delegation into Mexico City. While the delegation did not obtain everything it sought due to opposition in Congress, which the support of President Vicente Fox was not able to overcome, the villages remain under Zapatista control, in large part due to the local villagers and their support of the group. In August 2003, the EZLN declared all Zapatista territory an autonomous government independent of the Mexican state. Since then, the armed EZLN has been lying low to some extent working on the government level to implement health care and educational institutions in poor rural indigenous communities that had until then been ignored and discriminated against by the central government. Anti-Zapatista paramilitary activity continues, pointing to the threat of re-escalation.

[edit] Demographics

About 55% of the state's population consists of Mestizos, 40% Amerindian (35% of which not speak Spanish) & the remaining 5% is composed of Blacks and a few Middle Easterners.

[edit] Murals

The Zapatista communities of Chiapas are also celebrated for their murals. Vibrantly colourful communal paintings done on the outside walls of village buildings tell the recent Zapatista story of resistance - a story which often uses images of historical political heroes.

[edit] Landmarks

The Cañon del Sumidero ^[2] (English: Sumidero Canyon) is occupied now by an artificial lake, the presa (dam) Chicoasen ^[3], which produces a large percent of the electricity in Mexico. The sides of the cañon are covered with tropical vegetation.

The Alvarez del Toro Zoo, ZOOMAT ^[4], in Tuxtla Gutierrez, featuring local, native fauna.

The Lagunas de Montebello, near Comitan.

The Cataratas de Agua Azul (Blue Waterfalls), near Palenque.

The Maya ruins of Bonampak, in the Lacandon rainforest (La Selva Lacandona), feature probably the finest and better-known Maya murals. These are very realistic, depicting human sacrifices, music players and life at the royal court.

The Lacandon rainforest ^[5] itself is an important biodiversity spot, which recently yielded one of the newest and unique plant family discovered, represented by the plant Lacandonia schismatica.

The Soconusco, the south-eastern coastal region bordering Guatemala, is a tropical agricultural area devoted to the intensive production of bananas and coffee, for the national and international markets.

Chiapas is part of the Ruta Maya or Gringo Trail that links Cancun, Belice, Tikal, Lake Atitlan, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque and other Maya archeological sites.

San Cristobal de las Casas, ^[6] is a favorite international tourist destination due to its colorful First Nations traditions and customs.

Waterfall at Misol-Ha.