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  • The Other Mexico: Subcomandante Marcos is Back
  • Bryan E. Vizzini
The Other Mexico: Subcomandante Marcos is Back (2008). Written and Directed by Francesca Nava. Distributed by Choices Video. www.choicesvideo.net 50 minutes.

Writer-director Francesca Nava’s The Other Mexico opens in 2006, with the mysterious masked Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos launching his so-called “other campaign,” on the eve of the nation’s presidential elections. Rejecting traditional party politics, the “other campaign” calls for an alliance of lower and middle-class Mexicans in the form of a non-party people’s movement—an undertaking described as democracy from below. The other campaign, though, like Marcos’s 1994 insurgency in the state of Chiapas, has its greatest success as a focal point for the grievances and needs of Mexico’s poor.

A piece of living folklore, Subcomandante Marcos exploded onto national and international stages alike, as the leader of a movement drawing its inspiration from Emiliano Zapata, hero of the Mexican Revolution. A standoff with the Mexican government followed, during which he gained global attention through a shrewd combination of interviews, dramatic actions, and technological savvy. Indeed, the Zapatistas may well prove to have been the first revolutionary movement in history to maintain its own website. Marcos also oversaw the creation of caracoles (Spanish for snail-shells), largely autonomous indigenous villages that eschewed participation in Mexico’s formal political arena and institutions.

Interviews throughout the film repeatedly affirm Marcos’s enduring mystery. One man identifies him as a former Mexico City college student, while another claims he is a foreigner, a white man even. The Mexican government, Nava adds, believes Marcos to be the nom de guerre of one Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, a former professor of philosophy who dropped out of sight in 1983, the year that the masked subcomandante first appeared.

The film goes on to explain how fears over globalization, and the subsequent passage of NAFTA, gave birth to Marcos and his modern-day Zapatistas. While the insurgency stunned much of the world, and even segments of Mexican society, the real shock was that it came as any surprise at all. The government’s longstanding alienation of Mexico’s poor had resulted in violence before, most notably in 1910 when free trade, foreign investment, and the steady loss of regional and national autonomy—all the hallmarks of globalization—sparked the Mexican Revolution.

Elaborating upon the connection between globalization and the more recent political upheavals of 1994 and 2006, writer/anthropologist Carlos Montemayor charges that multinational corporations effectively render national governments little more than regional administrators for more powerful global economic interests. Additional interviews underscore the common perception that Mexico’s “political class,” historically, has proven complicit in facilitating the latter because of the material benefit to the nation’s wealthiest strata. In a cinematic nod to these class-based [End Page 81] assessments of Mexico’s political instability, Nava offers extensive footage of the material conditions in which many rural and urban Mexicans live. The images serve as stark reminders of the immense gulf between the nation’s haves and havenots. Interviews with lower-class Mexicans, for their part, reveal a deeply entrenched sense of resignation. In the eyes of the poor, differences between the nation’s political parties amount to little more than a smokescreen. In the end, they attest, all the parties are manifestations of the aforementioned political class.

In assessing the “other campaign’s” viability, though, criticism, even from those who sympathize with the movement, is readily forthcoming. Journalist Jorge Sandoval of the Mexican periodical El Sol de México , for example, notes that the “other campaign’s” utopian nature makes it highly impractical if not downright Quixotic. What can it truly achieve, Sandoval wonders, if it functions simply as a rejection of politics? A more practical, and potentially fruitful, approach, he suggests, would be for Marcos to ally himself with Mexico’s left-leaning Democratic Party of the Revolution (PRD). Then Marcos and his allies might be in a position to pass legislation and effect real change.

Other analysts, by contrast, praise Marcos for his transformation of the Zapatistas from a military movement to a political one, and from one...

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