Mexico’s Rebel With a Cause and a Knack for Prose

It has been nearly four years since Latin America’s best-known guerrilla left his outpost in the Chiapas jungle. The guns of his rag-tag army are silent. His peaceful revolution, the tedious building of autonomous Indian communities, has slid off Mexico’s political agenda, and his once-fervent international solidarity network is drying up.

But Subcommander Marcos, who led the Zapatista uprising more than a decade ago, is still a master of surprise.

Perhaps to distract himself, perhaps to put his movement back in the headlines, the pipe-smoking professor turned ski-masked insurgent has launched a new incursion, this time into the realm of fiction. He has teamed up to write a detective story with Mexico’s leading practitioner of the genre, Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

The two take turns writing chapters that appear each Sunday in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada, and their renown has made the project a literary sensation. Its prologue promises to expose evil in modern Mexico and get into “the guts of the national disaster.”

The idea was Marcos’, and the way he approached Taibo sounds worthy of a passage in the novel. One recent Sunday morning, the novelist found a messenger at his door with an envelope bearing his name and the admonishment: “For Your Eyes Only.”

“I was happily at work on a biography of Pancho Villa, and suddenly this letter arrived,” Taibo said. “My first reaction was to say no. I foresaw the kind of craziness this would become. But I gave myself until the count of 10 to decide, and when I got to nine, I asked myself, ‘Paco, when have you ever shied away from something crazy?’ ”

Taibo, who sympathizes with the Zapatista’s struggle for Indian self-rule, worked out the novel’s ground rules in an exchange of letters with the reclusive rebel leader.

The novel is published as a work in progress, each chapter spun off the one before it. The fourth installment is due today.

Marcos has written Chapters 1, 3 and 5, introducing his main character, a Zapatista investigator named Elias Contreras who gets around Chiapas on a mule. Taibo has written Chapters 2, 4 and 6, built around the Mexico City exploits of Hector Belascoaran Shayne, the cynical, dry-witted detective featured in nine of his novels.

The novel is titled “The Awkward Dead,” a reference to a student activist who was killed 33 years ago but in the novel seems to be leaving voice mail on an old friend’s answering machine. Taibo predicts that other dead people will color the plot with dark secrets of a Mexico struggling to shed a seven-decade legacy of autocratic rule.

As agreed by the coauthors, the two detectives are to meet for the first time in Chapter 7, at the Revolution Monument in Mexico City, and begin a joint investigation. Taibo says neither collaborator knows yet how the tale will develop, how many chapters it will run or how it will end.

But Marcos, writing in Chapter 3, identified the two detectives’ quarry as a villain named Morales who personifies the “the system” and its evil. “When there is a crime, you have to go high up in search of the culprit, not down,” he wrote.

“This is a novel about demons loose in Mexico, in the jungles of Chiapas and the urban jungle of Mexico City,” Taibo said in an interview, sitting in front of his home computer. A newspaper photo of the reclusive rebel was tacked to a bookshelf overhead. The novelist said he talks to the photo in lieu of face-to-face consultation.

“We both want to say that in this country, justice does not exist,” Taibo said. “And that it suffers from a very high level of impunity, arbitrariness and abuse.”

The guerrilla leader also wants to raise money for his cause, Taibo said, and the coauthors have agreed to channel profits from book sales to Zapatista communities through an independent Mexican organization. Deals have been signed for publication of the novel in Italy, Germany, Spain and much of Latin America, and for Spanish readers in the United States, Taibo said. In addition, three publishers have inquired about English-language rights, he said.

Marcos’ lengthy communiques, often written in poetic or parable form, have been a trademark of the Zapatista movement. The police novel is a stylistic departure, “an extraordinarily useful way to show power relationships, inequality and social injustice,” said Luis Hernandez, editorial page editor of La Jornada.

A Zapatista spokesman in Mexico City declined to comment on Marcos’ reasons for collaborating on the novel. But it is clear that the rebel leader is using his chapters to look critically at not only Mexican society but also his own movement.

Mexican authorities have mostly ignored the Zapatistas since 1994, when the army drove the poorly armed rebels from several towns back into the jungle in 12 days of fighting that claimed 145 lives. But in 2001, President Vicente Fox let unarmed Zapatista rebels march to Mexico City, hold a rally and speak before Congress.

A diluted version of their demands for Indian rights later was passed by Congress. Angered, the Zapatistas broke off peace talks with the government and unilaterally began setting up self-governing communities that have little contact with Mexican institutions and the rest of the world, except for dwindling private donations from abroad.

Marcos, who has not appeared in public since the 2001 rally, is not an Indian. He’s a former philosophy professor identified by government officials as 47-year-old Rafael Sebastian Guillen. In the drive toward self-rule, he has tried to get the Indians to make decisions for themselves, question traditional practices that hold them back and respect women’s rights.

The novel has allowed the rebel leader to vent frustration over their lack of progress -- through the voice of a fictional Subcommander Marcos strikingly similar to the real one.

After sending the mule-riding sleuth Contreras to track down a missing Zapatista woman, the fictional Marcos is shocked to learn why she ran away: Her Zapatista husband, jealous of her standing in the village, had been beating her.

“Maybe you know someone who once in a while cannot be a Zapatista?” Contreras asks.

“How long does it take to become a Zapatista then?” the commander responds.

“Sometimes it takes more than 500 years,” says the investigator, referring to the time since the Spanish conquest.

In another passage, the fictional Marcos questions the reliance on Indian customs by climbing onto the roof of an outhouse to test a centuries-old method of construction -- and falls to the ground as it collapses.

Before he can lift himself up, a Zapatista woman approaches him to report that a rebel army captain has been flirting with her.

“Do you want me to reprimand him?” Marcos asks.

“No,” says the woman, blushing. “I am only asking to know whether it is permitted.”

Exasperated and still lying in the mud, Marcos mutters to himself: “Maybe I am getting too old for this job.”

And so the real Marcos is trying to reinvent himself, concludes Homero Aridjis, one of Mexico’s best-known poets, who has been reading the novel.

“Marcos has always been a repressed writer,” Aridjis said. “The media was starting to consider him politically dead, so this novel sounds like a resurrection. I hope that it is not simply a work of literary opportunism, but one that will reveal Marcos’ hidden talents.”