39 El Revolucionario
Subcommandante Marcos, or El Sup, as he is known in Mexico. He speaks with palpable erudition. The sword and the pen: he is a rebel yes, but also an intellectual, a mind perpetually alert. And like some ranting dissenter, he is always prepared to say No: No to the five centuries of abuse of the indigenous people of Chiapas and the nearby Quintana Roo of the Yucatan Peninsula.
No to the sclerotic one-party state that has mortgaged Mexico and her people for generations, and for generations to come. No, No, and No. He isn’t a terrorist but a freedom fighter, and a peaceable one at that. He took up arms because debate is unfruitful in his milieu. He is a guerrillero of the modern times who understands, better than most people, the power of word and image. He uses allegories and anecdotes, old saws and folk tales, to convey his message. Not a politician but a storyteller -an icon knowledgeable in iconography, the new art of war, a pupil of Marshal McLuhan. As he himself once wrote, “My job is to make wars by writing letters.”
El Sup is a tragic hero, a Moses without a Promised Land. He stands in a long line of Latin American guerrilla heroes, at once real and mythical, an insurrectionary tradition stretching back nearly half a millennium. El Sup: newspaper columnists and union organizers credit him for the wake-up call that changed Mexico forever. He had gone to Chiapas in 1983 to politicize people. “We started talking to the communities, who taught us a very important lesson,” he told an interviewer. ”The democratic organization or social structure in the indigenous communities is very honest and very clear.” He fought hard to be accepted, and he was, although his pale skin marked him as an outsider. (Though the preeminent spokesperson for the Zapatista movement, he could never aspire to a position greater than subcommandante, as the highest leadership positions are customarily reserved for Indians.) The next ten years were spent mobilizing peasants, reeducating them and being reeducated in turn. The rest, as they say, is history.
They were not alone, the Zapatistas in San Andrés with their agreements. Together and behind them are the Indian people, and the towns and jungles of the country where they live. They are the Zapatistas. As then, and as now, they make small strides in the greatness of history with their faces, their words and their hearts. They are the indeginous: nahuatl, paipai, kiliwa, cucapa, cochimi, kumiai, yuma, seri, chontal, chinanteco, pame, chichimeca, otomt, mazahua, matlazinca, ocuilteco, zapoteco, solteco, chatino, papabuco, mixteco, cuicateco, triqui, amuzgo, mazateco, chocho, izcateco, huave, tlapaneco, totonaca, tepehua, popoluca, mixe, zoque, huasteco, lacandon, maya, chol, tzeltal, tzotzil, tojolabal, mame, teco, ixil, aguacateco, motocintleco, chicomucelteco, kanjobal, jacalteco, quiche, cakchiquel, ketchi, pima, tepehuan, tarahumara, mayo, yaqui, cahita, opata, cora, huichol, purepecha, kikapu.
And rightly so: after all, on the night of January 1, 1994, just as the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, among Canada, the United States, and Mexico, was about to for into effect, he stormed onto the stage. Lightening and thunder followed. It was a night to remember.
As José Juárez, a Chiapas local, described it, “it was on the New Year’s Eve when President Carlos Salina de Gortari retired to his chamber thinking he would wake up a North American. Instead he woke up a Guatemalan.” No, said the Subcomandante. Mexico isn’t ready for the First World. Not yet. Everywhere people rejoiced, ¡Un milagro! A miracle! A wonder of wonders! So spoke Bishop Samuel Raul Ruiz Garcia, the bishop of San Cristóbal, whose role in the Zapatista revolution angered conservatives, but who was endorsed by millions worldwide, turning him into a favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize.
With his trademark black skintight mask, El Sup was constantly on television. ”Un Enmascarado” Mexicans turned him into a god. Since pre-Columbian times Mexico has been enamored of the mask. A wall between the self and the universe, it serves as a shield and as a hiding place The mask omnipresent in Mexico: in theaters, on the Day of the Dead, in lucha libre the popular Latin American equivalent of wrestling. And among pop heroes like El Zorro, El Santo the wrestler, and Super Barrio, all defenders of los miserables, masked champions whose silent faces embody the faces of millions.
El Sup had a rifle, yes, but he hardly used it. His bullets took the form of faxes and e-mail’s, cluster bombs in the shape of communiqués and nonstop e-mail midrashim through the Internet. He wrote in a torrent, producing hundreds of texts, quickly disproving Hannah Arendt’s claim that “under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.” In less than twelve months, during sleepless sessions on the word processor in the midst of fighting a war, El Sup generated enough text for a 300 page volume. And he sent it out without concern for copyright. His goal was to subvert our conception of intellectual ownership, to make the private public and vice versa. He is a master in marketing. By presenting himself as a down-to-earth dissenter, a nonconformist, a hipster dressed up as a soldier, he made it easy to feel close to him. To fall in love with him, even.
-An excerpt from “Unmasking Marcos,” in THE RIDDLE OF CANTINFLAS,
by Ilan Stavans [1998]
