“Marcos is gay in San Francisco; Black in South Africa; Asian in Europe; Chicano in San Isidro; anarchist in Spain; Palestinian in Israel; Indigenous in the streets of San Cristóbal; a gang kid in Neza; a rocker in CU; Jewish in Nazi Germany; an ombudsman in Sedena; a feminist within political parties; a communist after the Cold War; a prisoner in Cintalapa; a pacifist in Bosnia; Mapuche in the Andes; a teacher in the CNTE; an artist without a gallery or representation; a housewife on a Saturday night in any neighbourhood of any city in any Mexico; a guerrilla in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century; a striker in the CTM; a reporter writing filler stories for the inside pages; a macho man within the feminist movement; a woman alone on the metro at 10 p.m.; a bored pensioner in the Zócalo; a landless peasant; a marginal publisher; an unemployed worker; a doctor without a job; a nonconformist student; a dissident under neoliberalism; a writer without books or readers; and, of course, a Zapatista in southeastern Mexico."
"Marcos is all the rejected and oppressed minorities, resisting, rising up, shouting ‘¡Ya basta!’ – ‘Enough!’ All the minorities when it is time to speak, and the majorities when it is time to remain silent and endure. All the rejected searching for a word, their own word, the one that will restore the majority to us, the eternally fragmented. Everything that disturbs power and the good consciences, that is Marcos. And for that reason, all of us who struggle for a different world, for freedom and the emancipation of humanity, all of us are Marcos.”
Subcomandante Marcos
Within the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the clandestine Mexican movement rooted in anti-capitalist, Indigenous and anarchist ideas, there are around 76 commanders, but only one subcommander.
The subcommander is the highest position in the hierarchy, despite the name, which refers to the fact that he stands below the people, who are considered the highest authority.
Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson and 'anti-leader' of the Zapatistas, has become a 'postmodern Che Guevara,' as one journalist put it. Known for his trademark ski mask and pipe and for his charismatic personality, though his identity was never definitively established.
The goal of the EZLN, which operated in the Chiapas region of Mexico, was to achieve a new social relationship by creating an anti-capitalist participatory democracy. It also defended the individual and collective rights of Mexico's indigenous peoples.
Chiapas, with a large indigenous Mayan population, is one of Mexico's poorest states despite rich natural resources. The Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, whose views were informed by liberation theology, sent catechists to teach both the Gospel and to call for social change among the indigenous communities and the mestizo immigrants from other regions of Mexico. It was in this poor, somewhat politicized indigenous population that the EZLN built its organization with tacit support from many of the Catholic catechists.
Marcos coordinated the EZLN's 1994 uprising, headed up the subsequent peace negotiations, and played a prominent role throughout the Zapatistas' struggle in the following decades. After the ceasefire the government declared on day 12 of the revolt, the Zapatistas transitioned from revolutionary guerrillas to an armed social movement, with Marcos's role transitioning from military strategist to public relations strategist.
He became the Zapatistas' spokesperson and interface with the public, penning communiqués, holding press conferences, hosting gatherings, granting interviews, delivering speeches, devising plebiscites, organizing marches, orchestrating campaigns, and twice touring Mexico, all to attract national and international media attention and public support for the Zapatistas. and became an icon of the global anti-capitalist struggle .
In 2001, he headed a delegation of Zapatista commanders to Mexico City to deliver their message on promoting indigenous rights before the Mexican Congress, attracting widespread public and media attention.
In 2006, Marcos made another public tour of Mexico, which was known as The Other Campaign.
According to the Mexican government, he is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, born on 19 June 1957. in Tampico, Tamaulipas, to Alfonso Guillén and Maria del Socorro Vicente.
He was the fourth of eight children. A former elementary school teacher, Alfonso owned a local chain of furniture stores, and the family is usually described as middle-class.n a 2001 interview with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo, Guillén described his upbringing as middle class and "without financial difficulties," and said his parents fostered a love for language and reading in their children.
While still "very young", Guillén came to know of and admire Che Guevara—an admiration that would persist throughout his adulthood.
Guillén attended high school at the Instituto Cultural Tampico, a Jesuit school in Tampico.He studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) during a time when the Marxism of Louis Althusser was popular, which is reflected in Guillén's thesis.
He began teaching at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) while finishing his dissertation at the UNAM, and somewhere during this time was introduced to the Forces of National Liberation (FLN).
Several key members of the FLN's Chiapas arm, which later became the EZLN, were employed at the UAM.
In 1984, he abandoned his academic career in the capital and left for the mountains of Chiapas to convince the poor, indigenous Mayan population to organize and launch a proletarian revolution against the Mexican bourgeoisie and the federal government.
After hearing his proposition, the Chiapanecans "just stared at him," and replied that they were not urban workers, and that from their perspective the land was not property, but the heart of the community.
Debate exists as to whether Marcos visited Nicaragua in the years soon following the Sandinista Revolution that took place there in 1979, and, if he did, how many times and in what capacity. He is rumored to have done so, although no official documents (for example, immigration records) have been discovered to attest to this.
Nick Henck argues that Guillén "may have journeyed" to Nicaragua, although to him the evidence appears "circumstantial."
Guillén's sister Mercedes Guillén Vicente was the Attorney General of the State of Tamaulipas from 2005 to 2006, and an influential member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
In a 2006 interview, Marcos stated that the Zapatista movement did not seek to take political power in Mexico, but rather to legitimise popular and Indigenous demands through forms of self-government.
In it's history s the Zapatistas established their autonomous communities, engaged in attempts to build a national indigenous movement, and carried out political propaganda against capitalism through their "Other Campaign,” it was Subcomandante Marcos who acted as the group's spokesperson.
Since the Zapatistas' political decision-making processes are not transparent, one presumes that Marcos played a central role in shaping the EZLN's autarkic and sectarian strategy that rejected not only Mexico's corrupt political system and parties, but also coalitions and alliances with others on the Mexican left.
Marcos’s great communicative ability was also expressed through his writing. His political activity extended into literature as well. Marcos is a prolific writer whose considerable literary talents have been widely acknowledged by prominent writers and intellectuals, with hundreds of communiqués and several books being attributed to him.
Most of his writings are anti-capitalist while advocating for indigenous people's rights. He was the creator of Old Antonio and Don Durito of the Lacandon Jungle, characters representing Indigenous culture and Western culture respectively.
He has also written poetry, children's stories, and folktales and co-authored a crime novel. He has been hailed by Régis Debray as "the best Latin American writer today." Published translations of his writings exist in at least 14 languages.
His iconic phrase—"We are all Marcos"—is the foundation of his philosophy on collective identity, emphasizing that his mask represents every marginalized, voiceless person in the struggle for justice.
Making his first public statement in five years, in May 2014 Marcos denied claims that he was either in ill health, had died, or had been displaced or purged by the EZLN. From now on, he said, he would be known as “insurgent subcomandante Galeano,” taking his new name from his comrade José Luis Solis López, better known as “Galeano,” a Zapatista militant assassinated by a paramilitary group on May 2 in the autonomous Zapatista town of La Realidad. He stated that the persona of Subcomandante Marcos had been "a hologram" and no longer existed.
In stepping down, Marcos pointed to demographic changes in the thirty-year old organization as new younger, indigenous leaders stepped forward replacing an older largely mestizo leadership, several of whom came out of the student and guerrilla struggles of the 1970s and 1980s.
Here are some further thoughts from Subcomandante Marcos to reflect upon.His words have always bought me comfort and have been a source of much inspiration. Another world is not only possible it is inevitable.
" What do we have to ask forgiveness for? What are we going to be forgiven for? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it?"
"If we remained silent, we would die. Without words, we would not exist. We fight to speak out against oblivion, against death, for memory and for life. We fight out of fear of dying the death of oblivion...it is necessary to create a new world. A world where many worlds fit, where all worlds fit."
"I am who I am and you are who you are. Let's build a world where I can be myself without ceasing to be me, where you can be yourself without ceasing to be you, and where neither you nor I force the other to be like me or like you."
"Love is like a teacup that every day falls to the ground and breaks to pieces. In the morning the pieces are gathered and with a little moisture and a little warmth, the pieces are glued together, and again there is a little teacup. He who is in love spends life fearing that the terrible day will come when the teacup is so broken that it can no longer mended."
"In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice. "
"History is nothing more than scribbles that men and women write on the ground of time. Power writes its scribble, praises it as sublime writing, and worships it as the only truth. The mediocre merely read the scribbles. The fighter spends his time scribbling on pages. The excluded don't know how to write...yet."
Subcomandante Marcos
