Subcomandante Marcos

Subcomandante Marcos was the masked, pipe-smoking spokesman of the Zapatista army that took four towns in Chiapas on the morning the North American Free Trade Agreement came into force, and for twenty years afterwards the writer of communiqués from the Lacandon jungle that mixed Marx, Mayan cosmology, jokes and a beetle named Durito, faxed to the world's press and translated in the week; the government named him in 1995 as Rafael Guillén, a philosophy lecturer from Tampico, and he neither confirmed nor cared. He was born in 1957, one of eight children of a furniture dealer, studied at the national university and taught design at the Metropolitan, and went into the mountains of Chiapas in 1984 with a Guevarist cell that had planned a foco and found instead that the Tzeltal and Tzotzil communities would join only on their own terms. The ten years of listening that followed made the Zapatista Army of National Liberation an indigenous movement with a mestizo mouthpiece who called himself sub-commander because the commanders were the Indian councils. On 1 January 1994 some three thousand fighters took San Cristóbal and three other towns, declared war on the Mexican army and the government, and fought for twelve days until a ceasefire. The communiqués began at once, and the mask, the cap and the pipe were on every front page. He negotiated at the cathedral in February with Bishop Ruiz, led the march of the caravan to Mexico City in 2001 to address Congress on the indigenous rights law, which Congress then gutted. In 2006 he toured the country as Delegate Zero in an anti-campaign against every candidate. The Zapatista territories governed themselves through good-government councils from 2003 without him. In May 2014 he announced at a night ceremony that Marcos had been a hologram the movement needed and no longer did, and that he would be called Galeano, after a teacher the paramilitaries had killed. He is still in the jungle and still writing, which is more than most of the decade's revolutionaries managed.

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