Middle-Class Roots Tarnish Leader’s Image

He was the overnight messiah of Mexico’s hard-core political left, an instant symbol of empowerment and hope for millions of campesinos throughout Mexico. Shrouded in a ski mask, bandoleer belts of shotgun shells and a hip pistol, he had intense eyes and a voice that made him a sudden heartthrob for many Mexican women, from the pueblos to the affluent salons of Mexico City.

Late Thursday, the image was shattered.

Subcommander Marcos, the spokesman and black-masked symbol of the peasant and Indian revolt for justice and equal rights in the southernmost state of Chiapas, was, in fact, Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo asserted on national television Thursday. Mexicans awoke Friday to newspaper photographs of a round-faced, scraggly bearded son of a well-to-do furniture-store owner from the port town of Tampico in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

He was neither Indian nor peasant, but an upper-middle-class intellectual with graduate degrees who was raised with seven brothers and sisters by the owner of Guillen Furnishings.

Marcos’ father, a soft-spoken local businessman, says he hasn’t seen or heard from his 37-year-old son in nearly three years.

And Friday, Subcommander Marcos had been publicly branded a criminal and fugitive from justice as part of a new government strategy to discredit and dismantle the Zapatista leadership.

By unmasking the man he identified as the charismatic leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army late Thursday, Zedillo scored what analysts Friday called a coup de grace in the arena of propaganda.

Ill-armed and ill-manned, the Zapatistas were never seen as a serious military threat. Despite the enormous theater and human toll of their 12-day shooting war with the Mexican army, which left 145 people dead a year ago, many of the guerrillas fought with wooden rifles.

Marcos and his forces have spent the past year holed up in their rain-forest hide-out near the Guatemalan border.

Not a single shot has been fired in the conflict since a cease-fire took effect more than a year ago.

But Marcos had other weapons at his disposal: a computer and printer, video recorders, television sets and, by some accounts, access to a fax machine and satellite phone--all powered by modern generators.

He has spent the last year hosting national conventions of social activist groups, staging bizarre all-night interviews and news conferences and even hosting a nightlong dance fiesta to mark the first anniversary of his New Year’s Day uprising.

On the propaganda battlefield, analysts said, Zedillo scored a major victory--at least in the short term--by exposing Marcos as an ordinary man, a university-educated philosopher who apparently turned from the rhetoric of the left to armed struggle after contact with the Sandinista guerrilla army while teaching at the University of Nicaragua.

Backed by extensive documents and testimony from detained Zapatista organizers, the government’s link between Subcommander Marcos and Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente was disputed by few Mexicans outside the ranks of the hard-core left.

Gathering at Mexico City’s Angel of Independence monument Friday, even the rank-and-file leftists appeared to accept it, although they chanted: “Marcos, our friend! We will always be with you!”

According to a biography released by federal prosecutors late Thursday, and confirmed in interviews with Guillen Vicente’s family, friends and former classmates, the man the government identified as Marcos was born June 19, 1957, in a well-to-do neighborhood of Tampico.

Family friends remember that he and his brothers and sisters all excelled in school, adding to a family reputation earned by his father, who owned the city’s best-known furniture outlet.

In the fall of 1977, Guillen Vicente left for Mexico City and enrolled in the department of philosophy and letters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico--which remains a bastion of Mexico’s political left.

Three years later, he graduated with a sociology degree after writing a thesis titled “Philosophy and Education: Practical Discourses and Practical Ideologies.”

He went on to earn a graduate degree and the title of associate professor in 1983 at a campus in Xochimilco, just south of the capital, but he resigned the following year.

Published reports Friday indicated that Guillen Vicente then left for the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, where he had his first direct contact with the Sandinistas. Those reports could not be confirmed Friday, but government sources said he returned to Mexico in the late 1980s to lay the foundation for the future Zapatista National Liberation Army.

It is a resume that paints the portrait of a classic Central American leftist neo-revolutionary, according to most analysts who appeared convinced that the government’s identification was accurate.

But it was certainly a background that the man identifying himself as Subcommander Marcos, in dozens of interviews during the last year, never suggested.

In the year that Marcos has held court for television networks, radio stations, newspapers and magazines from around the world, he has cast himself as mercurial, committed, always comic, clearly cosmopolitan but increasingly off-color and sometimes utterly bizarre.

*

Beginning several months after he and the Mexican army declared unilateral cease-fires, Marcos’ comments and behavior showed him to be a character far more colorful yet confounding than the steel-eyed guerrilla commander most Mexicans came to know through his official communiques and their television screens.

Invariably, Marcos appeared in a jungle clearing in the middle of the night to meet a handful of reporters who had waited an average of a week to see him. His ever-present pipe in hand, Marcos joked, rambled and cajoled so frequently that most journalists and many residents in Chiapas nicknamed him “Subcomedian Marcos.”

Through those interviews, Marcos maintained that he had spent the last decade living in the jungle, that he had formed the Zapatistas with three indigenous Mexicans and two other descendants of Spaniards in 1984, and that the movement grew rapidly beginning in the early 1990s, when radical government economic reforms enriched a handful of Mexicans in the cities while leaving many peasants and Indians behind.

Asked once whether he was concerned about army retaliation against Chiapas’ civilian population, the subcommander shook his head.

“There is no civilian population,” he said flatly. “Everyone here is a Zapatista, including the dogs. People here know how to defend themselves. They know how to go to the mountains and hide.”

Of any army attempt to capture him, Marcos once said: “If the army comes in here, it will take thousands of soldiers to get to San Miguel (the first Zapatista roadblock). It will take thousands more to get to La Garrucha (deeper in the jungle), and then months to push on until the end of the road. Even then, they’ll just control the road. We’ll control the jungle.”

It was when Marcos was asked about his personal life that the rhetoric of a revolutionary gave way to ramblings that entertained some and offended others.

Speaking in excellent English, Marcos regaled a group of American journalists last March with tales of jobs across the United States.

He gave a different version during a local business leaders’ breakfast group when he last visited his conservative hometown of Tampico in March, 1992, according to a local newspaper account that appeared at the time and those who recall his visit.

Serving as guest speaker, the son of Alfonso Guillen Guillen told the group that he had been teaching in Nicaragua, according to one businessman who attended. He spoke extensively about socialism, social activist causes and revolution throughout Latin America.