Mexico’s government has acknowledged that at least two well-known Mayan ruin sites are unreachable by visitors because of a toxic mix of cartel violence and land disputes.
But two tourist guides in the southern state of Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala, say two other sites that the government claims are still open to visitors can only be reached by passing though drug gang checkpoints.
The explosion of drug cartel violence in Chiapas since last year has left the Yaxchilán ruin site completely cut off, the government conceded Friday.
I was coincidentally just telling my daughter about how I took a trip across the Yucatan peninsula with my parents as a kid in the 80s. We took public buses and stayed in small hotels, so it was not as touristy as it could have been (although we did start at Cancun and end at Cozumel)… but I remember the poverty very well all these years later. There were child prostitutes, definitely indigenous, at the entrance to the ruins of Chichen Itza (that, at least, has apparently been cleaned up and better-maintained).
These were people who once created an amazing civilization. One that independently discovered writing and the number zero, came up with a complex calendar system, learned amazing hydraulic and irrigation techniques, working with almost unfarmable soil in a place that had few natural bodies of water, they even knew how to fill cavities! And they were reduced to literally prostituting their children.
This was under the PRI one-party state and the economy was in shambles, but I bet it’s not super improved.