BooksReviewThe words of Subcomandante Marcos in Our Word is our Weapon read like an instruction manual for the next wave of anti-capitalist protestOur Word is our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos
edited by Juana Ponce de León
Serpent's Tail £20, pp456
Buy it at a discount at BOL
The mountainous forests of Chiapas are Mexico's most beguiling and majestic landscape, but the region has long been bloodied by violence and authority-sanctioned crime. In those rolling hillsides, some 60,000 soldiers - almost a third of the Mexican army - have driven thousands of local people from their homes and into makeshift camps. Water is a luxury; tuberculosis, typhoid, cholera, measles, tetanus, pneumonia and malaria are wiping out whole communities.
In January 1994, Zapatista rebels in Chiapas declared war on the Mexican government, 'not to usurp power, but to exercise it'. After 12 days of fighting, during which the rebel groups overran San Cristobal de las Casas and a number of other neighbouring towns in Chiapas, the Zapatistas declared a ceasefire.
Their rebellion won worldwide support and the Mexican government was condemned by human rights groups. In the spring of 1994, still bullish from their victory, the Zapatistas invited the foreign and national press into the Lacandon jungle.
The Zapatistas' official spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, who appeared before the audience wearing a black mask, was asked: 'Why hide your face? What are you afraid to show?' To a stunned audience, Marcos offered to remove his mask and he wasonly stopped by cries of 'No! No! No!' The incident can now be viewed as a pivotal moment in the construction of a twentieth-century radical.
The Zapatista rebellion of 1994, as Marcos articulates here in this wonderfully annotated collection of thoughts, can be explained almost solely by the unequal distribution of land. In 1990, 6,000 of Mexico's most prosperous dynasties owned nearly 3,000,000 hectares of the available terrain in Chiapas, almost half the land of the state. At the same time, nearly a million villagers scratched a living on the remaining land, only 41 per cent of which was officially regarded as suitable for farming. Subcomandante Marcos writes: 'This is what capitalism leaves us as payment for everything that it takes away.'
Since the uprising, Subcomandante Marcos has seen his reputation become a byword for the anti-globalisation movement. Our Word Is Our Weapon, like all Marcos communiqués published since 1994, adds to his almost mystical appeal. Over the years, his mask has allowed Subcomandante Marcos to assume an iconographic persona.
Unlike revolutionary parties before them - the Black Panther Party For Self-Defence and the Nation of Islam were marginalised both by their politics and their visual aesthetic - Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas enjoy continuing appeal.
Speeches, letters and personal diary entries from the considerable Marcos archives have been published before - they are smuggled out of Chiapas by activists, students and journalists willing to preserve his words - but Our Word Is Our Weapon is the first authoritative omnibus to detail the evolution of a local rebel into a considerable international statesman. Included in this collection are eloquent and often emotionally demonstrative letters to the US government, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Set against other radical manifestos from the past - Huey P. Newton's Revolutionary Suicide, Elijah Muhammed's The Spirit of the Black Man and Bobby Seale's Seize the Time - Our Word Is Our Weapon exudes a political timelessness. And in this, the age of 'Anti-Corporate, Inc', the tempered words of Subcomandante Marcos read like an instruction manual for future rebellions.
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