Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask (review)

The Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, which began in January 1994, is one of the most important revolutions in Latin American history that never defeated a national army or seized the state. This uprising of indigenous peasants and mestizo radicals created a unique political opening that led to one of the most substantial peasant land invasions and re-indigenization of land tenure in Mexican history. This revolution, quickly contained by the Mexican army in a distant and isolated region in a distant and isolated Mexican state, nevertheless inspired millions of Mexicans and uncounted people around the world seeking an alternative to neo-liberal globalization. This outcome was not simply the result of a quixotic armed assault upon the Mexican state. A northern Mexican store-keeper's son, Rafael Sebastían Guillén Vicente—better known by his nom de guerre, Subcomandante Marcos—somehow managed to create a revolution in words, symbols, and myths that had more power and influence than guns and violence.

Nick Henck's book is the first English biography of Marcos. His lengthy study seeks to counter many accounts that portray Marcos as a "self-promoting, middle class, doctrinaire Marxist disguising himself as a liberal champion of Mexico's indigenous people" (p. 2), an interpretation put forward by Mexico's federal security forces and leaked to journalists and newspapers, and by former radical colleagues who left the mountains of Chiapas bitter and disaffected. Henck divides his book into three parts. The first and shortest section, "Rafael," examines the early years of Rafael's life from his childhood in Tampico to his university years in Mexico City. We know little about this boy and Henck's application of the dubious theories of birth-order unveils the problem of character formation. Rafael is influenced by Cervantes, Che, and—in Mexico City—Althusser, but one might ask what sensitive, poetry-loving, Latin American student in the 1970s was not?

It is in Part II, "Marcos the Guerrilla," that the book becomes more interesting and more substantial. This much lengthier section examines the nearly ten years that Rafael spent in the backlands of Chiapas in obscurity, discomfort, and frustration promoting revolution on behalf of the FLN, the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional, a want-to-be Marxist revolutionary group that emerged from Mexico's universities and middle-class students. Henck tells us that FLN militants in Chiapas were largely helpless in surviving in the deep forests of Chiapas and unable to communicate with the local indigenous people using the language of nineteenth-century Marxism. In time, however, these guerrillas learned to listen before they spoke. They came to understand that the local indigenous peoples had no understanding of the dogmatic vocabulary of Marxism and Leninism. Many of the FLN guerrillas were at a loss, but some—Marcos in particular—had the flexibility of mind and temperament to speak to the native people in parables, not unlike the Catholic priests, and in mythic Mayan terms. Native communities, of course, were not simply won over by rhetoric but by mestizos who lived worse than they did and offered to help them defend themselves against landowner gunmen.

The third part of the book, "Marcos the Star Spokesman," gives us the Marcos that most of us know. This Marcos consulted the indigenous communities in the early 1990s and began to follow their inclination towards armed insurrection. This section, the longest of the three, examines how Marcos seized San Cristóbal Las Casas, the largest city in the indigenous highlands of Chiapas, and then retreated to the isolated southeastern Lancandón forest in the face of overwhelming military force. This 'revolution' was over, or it should have been over. From the 'mountains of the Mexican southeast,' as Marco's repeatedly signed, eloquent communiqués in print and dispatched by email romanced Mexico and the world. Few Latin American contemporary writers and poets have the imagination and language invented by this young man isolated in...