Subcomandante Marcos (5.2)

The Mexican government asserts that el Subcomandante Marcos is in fact Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vincente. They are wrong. He is a man in a black mask with a pipe. At sunrise on January 1, 1994, the very day of NAFTA’s implementation, a small group of poorly-armed Mayan peasants leaked out of the Lacandona jungle in Chiapas, Mexico and, against all odds, took the major city of San Cristobal de las Casas. As the chaos and confusion of those first early hours evaporated like morning fog a leader materialized: Subcomandante Marcos. He had no name, no face, only a nickname and a balaclava. His brown army fatigues were crisscrossed by bandoliers, his neck hidden by a knotted red bandana, his wrists covered in woven indigenous bracelets, his masked head topped by a brown cap. He emerged like the peasants from the mists of that jungle morning, without a history. Ever since that day the government has attempted to pin him down with facts. He is supposedly Rafael Vincente, a middle class, well educated citizen. He is a philosophy professor at UAM, the Autonomous Metropolitan University, in Mexico City. And these snippets from his history attest to the fact that he is an essence a strange white man with strange Marxist ideas who secluded himself in the jungles of Southern Mexico in order to teach the illiterate peasants revolution. He is, simply, an idealist nut. But Marcos is a man without a past, without a history. He is a blank canvas, an unseen face underneath a black balaclava. He is whoever the Mexican people want him to be. And though his birth certificate may read Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vincente, he will always be Marcos.