Zapped Out: Adios to the Zapatistas - Don't come back

National Review, April 30, 2001 by Anthony Daniels

If you can't manage a coup d'etat, try a coup de theatre instead. That, at least, is the tactic employed by Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatistas, in Mexico. In an age when many people, dazzled by electronic and other imagery, have difficulty in distinguishing the medium from the message and the form from the substance, such a tactic has a pretty fair chance of success. It also has the inestimable advantage of being much less dangerous.

The Zapatistas have now decided to lay down their arms and participate in normal politics. Their rebellion ended with a cross between a bang and a whimper: a triumphant 2,000-mile march on Mexico City, which ended in the huge rally in the Zocalo, the central square of the most populous city in the world. This gave the impression-as, of course, it was intended to do-of unanimous admiration and approval of the movement and its leader. In the face of so popular a protest, who (except a supporter of the immemorial oppression of the Indians) could be churlish enough to doubt the noble aims of the Subcomandante, who so attractively combines in his person the qualities of Che Guevara and Christopher Hitchens?

There is no doubt that he has played brilliantly upon the weaknesses and susceptibilities both of his own country and of the liberal intelligentsia of Europe and America. Whether he originally intended to or not, the Subcomandante has given us an object lesson in the way the modern world works.

The origins of the EZLN-the Zapatistas' self-designated army-are now almost entirely forgotten, clouded by the adulation that is uncritically accorded to the Subcomandante. The EZLN started life as an orthodox, grimly serious Latin American guerrilla movement of the Salvadoran FMLN, Nicaraguan FSLN, or Guatemalan URNG variety. The Subcomandante, who has been convincingly identified as one Rafael Sebastian Guillen by a disaffected underling, was a teacher of graphic arts at the Autonomous University of Mexico. As the son of the owner of a chain of furniture stores, he did not himself emerge (surprise, surprise) from los de abajo, the poorest of the poor. A typical product of the long march through the institutions, he had read his Althusser and his Foucault, and was a great admirer of Guevara into the bargain. He disappeared into the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas in the 1980s, where survivors of the defeated 1970s guerrilla movement, the (pre-EZLN) FLN, were fomenting revolution among peasants already radicalized by Catholic catechists trained in marxisant liberation theology by the slippery, evasive, unscrupulous, and ambitious left-wing bishop of Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz, whose main aim in life seems to be winning the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing an end to a rebellion that he did so much to provoke.

It took the Subcomandante some ten years to gain control of the EZLN and bring it to the point at which he considered it ready to challenge the Mexican state. But by January 1, 1994 (the date on which the EZLN briefly occupied the capital of Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, and other municipalities in the state), there was little hope of support for the EZLN from any external power. The Soviet Union had collapsed and therefore Cuba was no longer in a position to provide aid, even had it wished to do so. Central America's "inevitable revolutions" (to quote the title of a book about them by one well-known North American academic) had by then been defeated and had fizzled out. It seemed as if it was the end of history: the end, that is, if history is regarded as nothing but the struggle of revolution with counterrevolution.

Marcos (his nom de guerre chosen in honor, incidentally, of a fallen leader of the erstwhile Marxist-Leninist FLN) nevertheless spotted an opportunity. He realized that the Mexican state would have at least one hand tied behind its back in responding to his uprising, because it needed desperately to present itself to the world as a modern liberal democracy like any other. A real guerrilla war, which it would be certain to win if it applied a certain amount of judicious brutality, would nevertheless do untold damage to its reputation. Moreover, for all its pretensions, the Mexican state has always lacked full legitimacy among its own people, particularly among its intellectuals, upon whose loyalty it could not count in a conflict with rebels. Itself claiming apostolic succession from a revolution, the Mexican government had for many years befriended Castro and Central American guerrilla movements in order to mask its own hostility to radical change. Such ambivalence and uncertainty was not a sound position from which to indulge in repression in the broad daylight of media attention.

Then, coming as he did from a highly sophisticated urban environment, Marcos understood only too well what the reaction would be of liberal intellectuals in Europe and America to the uprising he led. These intellectuals, he knew, would provide effective protection for him from the potential wrath of the Mexican state. And, as he also knew, the intellectuals had not willingly surrendered their utopian illusions about a perfectly harmonious life to be brought about by revolution in countries inhabited by poor peasants. The fantasies were dormant, not extinct.