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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2005 
Marcos Responds To Weight Ribbing
 Wire services
| | (Photo: Jorge Ríos/El Universal) |
Masked Zapatista rebel leader Subcomandante Marcos showed up with a surprise at his first public appearance in four years this month: a paunch straining against his ammunition belt.
After Mexican media began joking about the photos, Marcos acknowledged the weight gain with typical wry self-deprecation in a message published Thursday by the newspaper La Jornada.
"It's true that in photographs and videos one looks fatter than one is," he argued, joking that photographers must be working for his right-wing foes: "If not, well, they would have warned me and I could pull in the belly at moment of the shot."
Marcos was a tall, trim pipesmoking figure in a black ski mask when the when the Zapatistas seized several towns in the southern state of Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994.
He's still using the mask in public, but according to a government biography turned 48 last month. Survival also has been a less desperate struggle for the Zapatista National Liberation Army, which was once on the run from the army; it has moved steadily toward political rather than military activity.
Despite scattered local skirmishes with paramilitaries and rivals, the Zapatistas have not fought open battles with the army in more than 11 years.
Marcos finally acknowledge putting on pounds, saying if he had taken off the belt, "there would be a paunch like a six-month pregnancy."
"Well, yes, and what of it?" he wrote. "Fat but pretty."
He joked about the image of a mysterious political sex symbol that arose around him in the early years of the revolt.
"No more of that 'sex symbol' now," he wrote. "I tell you, now I don't even heat up the coffee."
On a more serious note, Marcos expanded on his recent criticism of Mexico's main leftist political party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) blasts that had distressed many Mexicans who supported both the party and the Zapatistas.
Marcos complained that party lawmakers had accepted a watered-down Indian rights bill that substituted for a stronger, Zapatista-backed measure the party had promised to accept.
He also said they had failed to take action when a PRD municipal government in Zinacantan had clashed with Zapatistas over water service.
He complained that the party's likely presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was surrounded by people who had only recently abandoned the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that held power when the Zapatistas rebelled.
Marcos said party supporters should ask why the leadership "has converted the party into a recycling machine for the worst of PRI-ism." |
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