The Zapatista people live in Chiapas and are very poor. Every year dozens of people pay money to travel to give aid to these people by helping with their crops. To describe the Zapatista people some might say that they have been left behind in globalization. Most of the people that are travelling down there are part of anti-globalization groups. Chiapas is a state in the southeastern region of Mexico. There are 4 million people who live there.

Many of the people are descendents of the Mayan people who were indigenous to South America. A sad statistic of the people there is that 40 percent of the population suffers from malnutrition. The reason they are so poor is because of the Spanish conquest 500 years previous. They were forced to grow their subsistence crops. The food that was taken from these crops was not a sufficient amount to almost just feed their families.

For centuries these people have been living in poverty, it has been ignored by a lot of people in the world, including the government. I was unaware of the situation with the Zapatistas until reading and researching about their situation. I think that people may be ignoring their need for help but a lot of people I think are uninformed, like I was an hour ago.

The people or the government there cannot ignore that saddening statistics of the poverty down anymore. Things that are helping the situation are the free trade agreement between them and the United States.