Since the January 1st uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), Subcomandante
Marcos-the guerrilla force’s most visible leader-has emerged as an articulate spokesperson for
the country’s dispossessed. His regular letters to the Mexican public are razor-sharp critiques of
Mexican society and Salinismo. The Mexican government has requested, cajoled and bullied the
national media into giving as little publicity as possible to Marcos. Those independent Mexican maga-
zines and newspapers which published Marcos’ letters saw their circulations skyrocket. Marcos was
interviewed in the liberated zone inside Chiapas’ Lacand6n jungle by Irish journalist Michael
McCaughan in March. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
What would you say were the roots of your personal
rebellion ?
It’s a process. It’s not a blow-up where you say it’s
now or never. You begin to take steps-first becoming
interested in a situation, then understanding that there
is injustice, then trying to understand the roots of this
injustice. This invariably leads you to ask yourself:
and you, what are you going to do about it? You begin
by helping out in small ways, taking logical steps,
without pressure, by your own initiative.
The moment arrives when you realize that you are
arriving at the point of no return as a human being. It
doesn’t mean that they are going to kill you or any-
thing, but that to turn back would mean to surrender.
It’s there where you stop and say: okay, I’m either
going to go ahead, or I’m going to turn back, or I’m
going to look for another way forward. It’s at that
moment that you have to choose.
In this case, turning back gives you a certain dis-
tance. You can keep a certain social prestige or status
for sure, and still bet on good will and charity. You are
a good man, then, in the social sense of the word, but
you figure out that you’ll have to make concessions,
accommodations, small compromises that begin
adding up. You know that it’s a mirage, a deception.
It’s something that you know is not going to resolve
the roots of the problem. More than anything, it’s like
an aspirin; when your head aches, it doesn’t cure the
illness, but only relieves the pain for a
little while.
Did you have any idea what would fol-
low after having made this choice?
I began to see the consequences of
following the road of commitment,
even if those consequences were dis-
guised in the illusions of youth and
spontaneity. But, at the end of the road,
you come to realize that you had the
authenticity that you really wanted.
This authenticity was different from
the other things that you had left
behind, that you had betrayed, that you
had abandoned, that you had killed. On
this road, everything was the opposite
of what you left behind. It meant aban-
doning everything, everything in every A Zapatis sense: name, family, prestige, future,
adulation. It meant starting over again, being another
person, someone who is authentic.
You realize that you had to be prepared to act in
accordance with your beliefs, and put all this in the
balance-I mean on the one hand, the sacrifices, the
things you had to give up, and on the other, being
authentic, “true” as we say. This was worthwhile.
Why in Chiapas?
The project of preparing a war, an armed struggle,
means that you have to think everything through. You
have to put together an army in conditions of secrecy.
You’re not going to form an army just by acting like
other guerrillas; rather, you have to prepare before act-
ing. You need geographic conditions of isolation,
security, depopulated zones, places where you won’t
be detected.
In addition to this, you need areas that are propi-
tious for political work. The panorama narrows at that
point, but there continue to be various options in
states such as Oaxaca and Guerrero. Then the princi-
pal element of our army appears, the other initiators:
the indigenous campesinos from the area who got to
know some of the compaiieros that began organizing
here. They said to us: why don’t you come here? here
there are mountains where you can go; if we are
fucked up, it’s precisely because nobody comes here.
So it was these campesinos who proposed Chiapas,
and so this is how we ended up here.
Has the government offered to buy off the peasantry?
When the government realized that the indigenous
peoples don’t have land or hospitals and all the other
things they are asking for, it was logical that they
offered them hospitals, schools, highways, etc. They
thought that this was the way to calm things down. At
ta army batallion in the Lacand6n jungle on May 15, 1994.
a moment near the beginning of the dialogue, [govern-
ment negotiator] Camacho realized that it was the
indigenous peasants who were in charge of the Com-
mittee and not Marcos. Camacho realized that he had
to turn to them and make them attractive proposals.
They were not going to respond to the offer of an
embassy or prerogatives of this type. He had to find
another price for them.
Are the government’s proposals the price, then, that it
is ready to pay to silence the indigenous peoples?
I see it as an attempt to influence them without
resolving the fundamental causes, which are the lack
of democracy, of freedom, and of justice. The govern-
ment is giving a bandaid that will allow it to recom-
pose its image, to reach the August elections in a good
climate, to recover its prestige. The government wants
to be able to say: we’ve already subdued the guerrilla,
we’ve got them under control. It shows that the gov-
ernment still has a lot of room to maneuver: they can
negotiate with an armed group, stop a war, bet that the
compas are going to go away with those false promis-
es and sign a peace agreement in exchange not for
highways, hospitals and schools but for only the
promise of them. In any case, it’s a ploy to buy time,
locate the leaders, divide them, and later break them
up, eliminate them, or buy them off. In short, they
want to take away the movement’s social base with
that promise. They think that these people whom
they’ve deceived for so long are now going to allow
themselves to be deceived yet again.
Why was there so much pressure on the government to
sign a peace accord?
Mounted troops of the Zapatista army.
Evidently, the urgency of trying to force a peace
treaty comes from the political calendar. Up until the
time of Colosio’s assassination, Salinas continued
handling things as if the government would fulfill our
demands out of the goodness of its heart, not because
it was a duty.
Is this also the mentality of the National Solidarity
Program (Pronasol)?
Pronasol has the mentality of a son of a bitch that
sees the indigenous people as children, as ill-bred chil-
dren. Instead of giving his kids a spanking like they
deserve, the father-who is so understanding and gen-
erous-is going to give them candy after getting them
to promise not to misbehave again, right? A dictator,
then, a dictatorship.
Doesn’t it seem to you that the government could-with
some political sleight-of-hand and minor changes–con-
vince the country that nothing has happened in Chiapas?
Right now, nothing is the same, nothing will ever be
the same again-including the government, which
will have to change the way it does business. Things
are out of order. It has to do not only with the Zap-
atista uprising, but also with the collapse of the myth
of Mexico’s entrance into the First World, of the sup-
posed apathy of the Mexican who will put up with
anything. The myth has exploded that this country is
at peace and contented with a government that makes
the people suffer. Now, anywhere you look, any
protest is necessarily against the government.
Why armed struggle?
We insist that armed struggle is the only way, because
we’ve tried everything else and it got us nowhere. It’s
only when armed struggle erupts that the country
becomes affected and is shaken, even at
the level of international relations.
And the response of civil society?
It wasn’t what we were expecting
now at the three-month point. People
lack experience to understand the
government. I think civil society got
duped by the government’s promises.
After the San Crist6bal peace talks, people thought the peace accord was
imminent, that it was only a question
of paperwork because they were
going to ask the communities, and
they were going to say yes because no
one can say no to such a marvellous
offer. It was forgotten that the causes
that led to the uprising still exist. If
we had signed a peace agreement, the
causes would remain; after Chiapas,
there would be another Chiapas.
How does the EZLN hope to achieve changes in the
economic order when a process of market globaliza-
tion exists from which it is impossible to separate
yourself?
There definitely has to be a change. You can’t talk
about only Chiapas in that context. Chiapas is the tip
of an iceberg which lies beneath the entire country.
Chiapas has called attention to itself because of the
form in which it shines, because of the novelty of its
armed movement, and its ideology. This same discon-
tentment with authority runs throughout the country.
It is going to reach crisis proportions. People are
going to question not only the whole economic and
political project of this country, but the ascendency of
neoliberalism in all of Latin America. It will provoke
a chain reaction of disasters and a readjustment of
international policies.
Does this mean, then, that the EZLN is in the van-
guard of a new wave of armed social movements?
Don’t give too much weight to the EZLN; it’s noth-
ing more than a symptom of something more. Years
from now, whether or not the EZLN is still around, there is going to be protest and social ferment in many
places. I know this because when we rose up against
the government, we began to receive displays of soli-
darity and sympathy not only from Mexicans, but from
indigenous peoples in Chile, Argentina, Canada, the
United States and Central America. They told us that
the uprising represents something that they wanted to
say, and now they have found the words to say it, each
in his or her respective country. I believe the fallacious
notion of the end of history has finally been destroyed.
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