The Mexican government’s prolonged offensive on the nation’s powerful drug cartels has relegated domestic and international coverage of the Zapatista indigenous movement to a mere footnote.
So it was hardly front page news when Subcommandante Marcos, the iconic ski-masked, pipe-smoking leader of the Chiapas-based rebels, recently issued a statement declaring that he “no longer exists,” or, in plainer language, was stepping down.
Marcos had not made a public appearance outside the southern Mexican state since the 2006 general election and rumors had begun to surface that his health was not good.
This was always denied but his announcement to quit still came as a shock to keen observers of 20-year-old conflict who believed that the rebel movement would fade into even greater obscurity without Marcos at its helm.On January 1, 1994 – the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into being – Marcos declared war on the neo-liberal federal government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, leading an armed rebellion in the poverty-stricken state of Chiapas that claimed at least 150 lives before a cease fire was agreed. Years of negotiations bore little fruit for the rebels, although they managed to secure control of several municipalities in Chiapas that became “self-governing” entities, responsible for their own education, health and other local matters.
The Zapatista insurgency propelled Marcos – whose real identity was soon exposed by the Mexican media as university professor Sebastian Guillen Vicente – into a symbol of hope for oppressed peoples everywhere. In the aftermath of the rebellion left-leaning supporters and sympathetic foreign journalists flocked to Chiapas to learn more about this man and spread his fame to many corners of the globe.
Marcos, however, always believed that his celebrity was irrelevant – a “distraction” in his own words – to the movement and the centuries-old struggle by Mexico’s indigenous population for greater rights, recognition and autonomy. His recent statement announcing his “retirement” confirmed this belief: The “persona of Marcos was nothing more than a “hologram,” he wrote. “Zapatista men and women have now destroyed him.”
Nonetheless, few analysts would argue that without Marcos the Zapatitsa rebellion would probably have gone down in Mexican history as little more than a glorious military failure. Marcos deliberately created an enigmatic, detached public image that turned out to be a shrewd media tactic. Repeatedly refusing to acknowledge his real identity, even after being outed, he shrouded himself in mystery, declining invitations to remove his mask and lend his voice to mainstream political debate. His reluctance to bring his movement into the cauldron of national politics was seen by many of his critics as an admission that he knew his popularity was confined to a tiny left-leaning segment of the population and that his message would have little impact at the ballot box. Marcos, on the other hand, never trusted the establishment, believing that its ingrained indifference toward the nation’s poor meant his movement had a greater chance of survival outside the political system, working for change from the grass roots up.
Marcos has given no indication that he will be leaving the isolated jungle territories where the Zapatistas reside and said “other rebels” would now act as the public face of the movement.