MEXICO : Marcos Is Back, and the Political Edge Is His Despite PRI Triumph

Two weeks ago, on the eve of Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo’s visit to Washington, the Zapatista Liberation Army’s Subcomandante Marcos predicted, in a letter to the American people, that in spite of the billions of dollars funneled into Zedillo’s Mexico by the Clinton Administration, “the dictatorship that darkens the Mexican sky will inevitably be erased.” He continued: “What reason is there for the North American people to fear our wooden rifles, our unshod feet, our broken bodies, our language and our culture?” The four-page letter, reprinted in La Jornada , went on to vilify U.S. leaders for supporting “the criminal” former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Marcos characterized as “a genocide without bullets” of Mexico’s indigenous peoples.

Nearly two years after the Zapatistas took over key cities in Chiapas to protest their government’s ratification of NAFTA and nine months after the Mexican army forced him into hiding, the unmasked Marcos is back in the saddle, as brash and loquacious as ever, and with an undimmed penchant for overwrought hyperbole to score points with his supporters worldwide.

Marcos’ perfectly timed reappearance underscored his flair for political theater as peace talks between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government resumed. The subcomandante rode on horseback at the head of the Zapatista delegation, wearing his trademark ski mask and with a pipe clenched between his teeth. The site of the latest round of negotiations is La Realidad (Reality), a hamlet in the Lacandon Forest. The chief topic will be indigenous rights and autonomy; but a larger forum in San Cristobal de las Casas, with 50 prominent Mexican intellectuals, women’s groups and church activists, has a more ambitious political objective: to insert Zapatista leaders into the national political dialogue.

The Zapatistas seemed unfazed by the resounding triumph in last Sunday’s local elections of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Their boycott of the voting hurt political allies; Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and his leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party were the big losers. PRI won a clear majority in the 40-seat legislature in Chiapas, and its mayoral candidates are leading in 80 municipalities while only 17 are going to PRD. The biggest surprise was the mayoral victory in Chiapas’ state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez, of the candidate of the center-right National Action Party.

The worldwide press coverage given the Zapatista uprising--far out of proportion to its military capabilities--obscured the fact that Chiapas has been a solid PRI state for many years, and has consistently voted its candidates into state office.

How, then, to explain the persistent impact of Marcos and the Zapatistas on the national political landscape? Zedillo gave the rebels their due when he announced that the PRI victory in Chiapas was a vote for peace and a settlement with the Zapatistas. He has apparently empowered the government delegation to extend substantive concessions to the indigenous communities.

Still, the PRI’s attempts to co-opt the Zapatistas with handouts, as they have with so many other indigenous groups since the ‘30s, have repeatedly failed, and their claim that time will erode rebel support sounds less and less convincing. For all its extensive network of patronage, the PRI cannot paper over the stark reality that Chiapas never benefited from the Mexican Revolution; it remains the poorest state in Mexico, and its large and diverse indigenous population is the most oppressed, economically and politically. Contrary to Zedillo’s expectations last February, the unmasking of Marcos as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, a militant university graduate from Tampico, has not eclipsed the rebel leader’s mystique or his standing with thousands of urban intellectuals who remember the government’s massacre of unarmed student protesters in the plaza of Tlatelolco in 1968.

In his recent book on the origins of the Zapatista uprising, Carlos Tello Diaz traces Marcos’ and other militant activists’ training in Marxist guerrilla organizations during the ‘70s. The National Liberation Forces established nuclei in Chiapas and other poor Mexican states to create the infrastructure for a grass-roots popular uprising. Before joining the guerrillas, Marcos was educated by Jesuits who honed his rhetorical skills as a weapon to achieve social justice. Emiliano Zapata was a convenient icon for the indigenous rebel movement, touching a nostalgic longing in the Mexican soul for a just, revolutionary Mexico of egalitarian neolithic villages.

In the Lacandon Forest, Tello encountered hundreds of angry Mayan campesinos who were driven from their homesteads by the Zapatistas, a reality that is seldom mentioned in the Mexican press. What Tello makes abundantly clear in the “Rebellion of Las Canadas” is that Marcos is no poetic Robin Hood or reborn Zapata, but a trained dialectician who has made brilliant tactical use of actual and potential allies--among them Cardenas, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, publisher and PRD candidate Amado Avendano and peace negotiator Manuel Camacho Solis--to advance the Zapatista agenda of seizing political power and influencing the renovation of Mexico’s political system. Tello supports the Zapatista agenda and remains a Marcos admirer, but as is evidenced by the Zapatistas’ cold-shouldering of Cardenas and the PRD in the Chiapas elections, Marcos is capable of discarding alliances when they no longer advance his cause.

One of the factors playing into Marcos’ hands is the unresolved assassination of the PRI’s presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, which has created a climate of uncertainty and a rise in violent crime. It is an open wound that refuses to heal, and accusations that Salinas’ brother was involved in Colosio’s and one other political assassination impair Zedillo’s bid to renovate and democratize the PRI by a Mexican version of perestroika.

The continuing economic strains in the wake of last year’s peso devaluation have also worked in the Zapatistas’ favor; tens of thousands of Mexicans have lost their jobs in part because of NAFTA-driven streamlining of the economy and the austere measures imposed by Zedillo to keep recovery on target.

What the Zapatistas never had a ghost of a chance to accomplish by armed rebellion they have made up for as possible kingmakers in the continuing infighting within the PRI. The more corruption and internal dissension are exposed within the ruling party, the more support Marcos and the Zapatistas gain from their admirers.

As improbable as it may seem, Chiapas continues to be the tail that wags the Mexican dog, and the engine that is propelling Mexico toward an agonizing and economically costly democratic transition after 60 years of PRI party dictatorship. The Mexican longing for a return to the roots of the Mexican Revolution have become embodied, for better or worse, in a Jesuit-trained poet and rebel with a golden pen and an uncanny instinct for seizing the political moment.*