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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | September 2005 
Mexican Rebel Leader Details Plans for 6 Month National Tour
 Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
| | Surrounded by his security detail, rebel leader Sub Comandante Marcos returns after a brief break to the main hall where the fine points of the 'Other Campaign' are being discussed in the town of La Garrucha, Mexico. (Photo: Dario Lopez-Mills) |
La Garrucha, Mexico – Mexico's Zapatista rebels on Saturday struggled amid shouts and catcalls to hammer out the details of the new movement that they pledged would "shake this country up" and start with a six-month nationwide tour.
The January-to-June tour is timed to grab attention away from the country's 2006 presidential race and, in theory, replace it with what the rebels call "another way of doing politics."
The problem is that no one seems exactly sure what the new movement – dubbed "the other campaign" – will really mean.
Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos opened the gathering of about 1,000 rebel supporters in this jungle hamlet with a harangue against electoral politics and his chief personal rival on the left, presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
"What we're going to do is shake this country up from below, pick it up and turn it on its head," Marcos told a cheering crowd of supporters.
The spokesman for the Zapatista National Liberation Army said he not only wants to travel state-to-state, he also wants to set up branch offices of the rebel movement throughout the country.
Marcos, whom Mexican officials identified in 1995 as former university instructor Rafael Sebastian Guillen, has been at the public forefront of the Zapatista movement since its rebels staged a short-lived armed uprising in January 1994 in the name of Indian rights and socialism.
The Zapatistas briefly occupied several cities and towns in Chiapas state but quickly settled into a tense cease-fire with the government. Since then their movement has been largely nonviolent.
On Saturday, one Mexican migrant living in the United States suggested that the new movement be taken there.
"This movement should focus on organizing Mexicans living abroad," Arnoldo Borja said.
An anarchist proposed the movement be "anti-authority" while another man drew both howls of protest and cheers of support when he asked that a portrait of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin be removed from the improvised wooden meeting hall.
"Don't create divisions," Marcos warned that speaker.
But Marcos saved his heaviest fire for Lopez Obrador, who leads polls on the 2006 race.
"We should have nothing to do with anything that relies on charisma," Marcos said in an evident reference to the populist style of Lopez Obrador, who stepped down as Mexico City mayor in July to seek the presidency.
Asked what he had to say to Lopez Obrador, the rebel leader parodied the former Mayor's famous phrase "look at my finger" – a wag of the index finger that means no. Only Marcos raised his middle finger in an obscene gesture aimed at Lopez Obrador.
Zapatista leaders have stressed that their tour would be unarmed, and that it would includes stops of a week or more in each of the country's 32 states.
Marcos said that after the stop in San Cristobal de las Casas, the tour will head to the Caribbean coast, and cross through southern and central states before arriving in Mexico City in April.
The Zapatistas have not left Chiapas, which borders Guatemala, en masse in nearly five years – and many questions remain to be answered about the upcoming trip, including whether Marcos and others will leave behind their ski masks, poetic rhetoric and Indian constituency.
Some urban activists who forged down mud-caked back roads to support the Zapatistas over the weekend wondered how the movement could move into sprawling cities while maintaining an armed wing in the jungle.
"In a strong movement, a well-organized movement, people act openly, with their faces uncovered," said Armado Montiel, a Mexico City housing advocate who leads a socialist group.
"But we can't tell Marcos to take off his mask," he said. "He has worn it since the beginning, and it has worked." |
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