Subcomandante Marcos: Never more… or forever?

The premeditated murder in Chiapas of José Luis Solís, a Zapatista “votán” (guardian) and teacher committed to his community, and the avalanche of international solidarity from all over the planet, condemning the crime and empathizing with the Zapatista cause, was the moment “Subcomandante Marcos” chose to leave the stage. He will reappear as Insurgent Subcomandante Galeano, the alias Solís once took due to his admiration for Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.

Jorge Alonso

Death will go away, fooled by an indigenous man whose nom de guerre was Galeano, and those rocks that have been placed on his tomb will once again walk and will teach whoever will listen the most basic tenet of Zapatismo, which is, don’t sell out, don’t give in, don’t give up…. Death commits us to the life it contains. So here we are, mocking death by fooling death in La Realidad.

Compas: Given the above, I here declare, at 2:08 am on May 25, 2014, from the southeast combat front of the EZLN, that he who is known as Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, self-proclaimed ‘Subcomandante of Stainless Steel,’ ceases to exist.… The Zapatista National Liberation Army will no longer speak through my voice. Okay. Health to you, and never more… or forever. Those who have understood will know that this doesn’t matter anymore, that it never has.”

With those words Subcomandante Marcos concluded his extensive speech to the EZLN chiefs of staff,some 3,000 Zapatista support bases, and another 1,000 people who had gone to the Caracol of La Realidad. Then after one of his usual brief humorous exchanges, he greeted the people again: “Good morning, compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Insurgent Subcomandante Galeano… They told me that when I was born again, I would do it collectively. So be it.”

They killed Galeano

What immediate events led Marcos to bring to an end the Zapatista’s legendary spokesperson in such an original way?
In late March, the Zapatistas had announced several activities. In the last week of May they would hold a meeting with around 30 indigenous organizations in one of their Caracoles, or centers of autonomous government; on June 1 they would pay homage to writer Luis Villoro; and days later, in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, they would hold an international seminar on “Ethics in response to dispossession” that artists and intellectuals from various countries had said they would attend. At that seminar, the EZLN would unveil a proposal involving national and international initiatives.

The government tried to prevent all of this and on May 2 launched its paramilitaries against the Caracol of La Realidad, which is seven hours from San Cristóbal de las Casas. They destroyed the autonomous school, cut the Zapatistas’ water pipeline, killed José Luis Solís and wounded 15 others. Solís, who had taken the alias Galeano, had come out unarmed to defend his compañeros and was beaten, shot and finished off with a coup de grace. Standing up to their fear, the women of La Realidad recovered his body.

A planned attack

On May 8, Subcomandante Marcos arrived in La Realidad and spoke there. He recalled how 20 years ago pain and anger had given birth to the public uprising of Zapatismo. And pain and anger were why they were in La Realidad. Solís had been one of the teachers of the course on “Freedom according to the Zapatistas” recently given in the Zapatista Little School. Marcos admitted he felt envious of those who had had the privilege of living alongside Solís... alongside Galeano.

His murder, Marcos said, had been a militarily pre-planned act of aggression executed with malice aforethought, premeditation and advantage. He charged that leaders of the Historical Independent Federation of Agricultural Workers and Peasants (Historical CIOAC) had been involved in the murder, as had the Ecologist Green Party, through which the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was governing the state of Chiapas. He also implicated the National Action Party (PAN) and the PRI itself. The Chiapas government was clearly involved and it remained to be seen whether the same was true of the federal government. Marcos recalled that the Historical CIOAC, its rival, the Independent CIOAC, and other organizations with links to the government such as the Ocosingo Coffee Growers’ Regional (ORUGA), were provoking paramilitary confrontations with the Zapatistas knowing that the government would reward them for doing so.

“I will continue it”

Subcomandante Moisés announced that all programmed activities were being suspended and that homage would be paid to Galeano on May 24 in La Realidad, the venue for many internnational and national meetings. It has been visited by Manu Chao, Eduardo Galeano, Juan Gelman, Madame Miterrand, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Ignacio Ramonet, Carlos Monsiváis, Oliver Stone and many other personalities.

Adolfo Gilly wrote to Eduardo Galeano to inform him of the murder in La Realidad of a Zapatista teacher who had adopted his name in memory of his stay there and because of his writings. Gilly told him that this Galeano was not a combatant and didn’t go around armed; he just taught, dialogued and convinced through words, and had been killed because the owners of power had fed and unleashed so much resentment and hatred. The writer and lifelong political activist replied from Uruguay: “I hope that other Galeano has not died in vain: I will continue [the struggle] in any event.”

Waves of solidarity
from around the world

The global response to the murder of José Luis Solís, or “Galeano,” was quick, powerful and overflowing. Over 50 national and international academics and artists, including Pablo González Casanova, John Berger, Hugo Blanco, Immanuel Wallerstein, Gustavo Esteva, Marcos Roitman, Raúl Zibechi, Jean Robert, John Giber and Jerome Baschet, publicly expressed their indignation, demanding the definitive cessation of acts of aggression against the “most consolidated civilizing project that has existed in Mexico and the world.”

People who had come from Argentina, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela to participate in the Zapatista Little School in La Realidad expressed the pain they felt at the attack against “ a political project that is an inspiration for many who are organizing for the building of another world.”

Around 30 collectives from around the world and 174 people, including Naomi Klein, Manuel Castells, Arundhati Roy, Noam Chomsky, Yvon Le Bot, Michel Hardt and Raquel Gutiérrez, wrote that the Zapatista struggle had been “a school of dignity that has sown rebelliousness and hope in the whole world.”

“This rage is a seed”

Meanwhile, another 130 personalities, among them Angela Davis, David Harvey, Mike Davis, David Graeber, Catherine Walsh and Arturo Escobar, issued a communiqué stating that attacking the Zapatistas amounted to attacking them. And more than 150 signatures of groups and individuals from Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, the USA, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary and Mexico were used to make an Abya Yala mourning textile (Abya Yala is an indigenous name for the American continent) that called the rage caused by the attack on the Zapatistas a seed.

Finally, a hundred artists and community and grassroots organizations from different parts of Mexico, Panama, Argentina and Spain told the Zapatistas that, learning from their example, they were resisting along with them and building a possible world from their particular geographies and based on their ways. One communiqué that brought together signatures from various countries said that the absences of those who had been murdered were not voids because “they were filled with living memory and the duty to continue the work.” They pointed to “a pyramid of guilty parties” responsible for the ambush in La Realidad: the neoliberal policies, Mexico’s President, Chiapas’ governor and those who had done the dirty work at the grassroots level.

For days and days, people and collectives from Latin America, the USA, Canada and Europe, even countries of the Middle East and New Zealand, connected with the pain felt for Galeano’s murder and the solidarity with the Zapatista cause.

“Let them do it; we won’t”

The solidarity response was also abundant and intense In Mexico itself. In addition to statements, there were many diverse protests, reaffirming that the Zapatistas are not alone. In the face of so much national and international pressure, on May 17 the Chiapas government detained La Realidad’s municipal agent and the president of the communal land commission, accusing them of being directly responsible for Galeano’s murder. Against all evidence, the media reported it as “a confrontation” not a crime. In this atmosphere, the conviction grew that the event in Galeano’s honor announced for May 24 in La Realidad would have a special importance.

Subcomandante Moisés provided new information about the circumstances surrounding Solís’ murder: women had been involved in the attack and the name of the woman who had macheted and dragged Galeano’s body was known. Moisés told the Zapatistas and sympathizers that they shouldn’t forget that their struggle is civic and peaceful and urged them to direct their rage against the system rather than “those people who are wrong in the head and only following the orders of the bad government.” He ended his speech by saying, “If they provoke, then let it be them who do so, not us. We’re fighters.”

It was already the early hours of May 25 when Marcos spoke as Marcos for the last time.

“Negotiate or fight
wasn’t our dilemma”

Marcos started his speech by stating that he was going to announce a “collective decision,” which raised expectations: “Perhaps as these words are being spoken there will be a growing feeling in your hearts that something is out of place, that something doesn’t add up, as if one or several pieces were missing to make sense of the jigsaw being revealed to you… Maybe afterwards, days, weeks, months, years, decades later, what we’re saying now will be understood.”

He talked about history, evoking the start of the Zapatista struggle and the questions that emerged among the Zapatistas after the first 12 days of fighting against the Mexican army, which he listed in the following way: “Should we prepare those who come after us for the path of death? Should we develop more and better soldiers? Invest our efforts in improving our battered war machine? Simulate dialogues and a disposition toward peace while preparing new attacks? Kill or die as the only destiny? Or should we reconstruct the path of life, that which those from above had broken and continue breaking?

“Nobody listened then,” he said, “but in the first babblings that were our words we made note that our dilemma was not between negotiating and fighting, but between dying and living… And we chose. Rather than dedicate ourselves to training guerrillas, soldiers and squadrons, we developed education and health promoters who went about building the foundations of autonomy that today amaze the world. Instead of constructing barracks, improving our weapons and building walls and trenches, we built schools, hospitals and health centers; improving our living conditions.”

The many “handovers”
in zapatismo

Twenty years later, as Marcos explained, the EZLN “not only hasn’t weakened, let alone disappeared, but has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively,” always true to the slogan they were born with: “Nothing for ourselves.” As Marcos said, this wasn’t some good catchphrase for posters and songs, but rather a reality.

The third part of his text, which Marcos titled “The handoff,” is important to understanding why they have grown. “In these 20 years, there has been a multiple and complex handoff, or change, within the EZLN. Some have only noticed the obvious: the generational. Today, those who were small or had not even been born at the beginning of the uprising are the ones carrying the struggle forward and directing the resistance. But some of the experts have not considered other changes. That of class: from the enlightened middle class to the indigenous peasant. That of race: from mestizo leadership to a purely indigenous leadership.

“And the most important: the change in thinking: from revolutionary vanguardism to ‘governing by obeying’; from taking Power Above to the creation of power below; from professional politics to everyday politics; from the leaders to the people; from the marginalization of gender to the direct participation of women; from the mocking of the other to the celebration of difference.”

Creating the figure

Finally, in the fourth part of his speech, Marcos referred to the role he has played during these 20 years of the EZLN. “Before the dawn of 1994, I spent 10 years in these mountains. I met and personally interacted with some of those whose deaths we all died in part. Since then I have known and interacted with other men and women who are here with us today. In many of the smallest hours of the morning I found myself trying to digest the stories they told me, the worlds they sketched with their silences, hands and gazes, their insistence in pointing to something else, something further.”

He lamented that many had focused only on him. “Their gaze had stopped on the only mestizo they saw with a ski mask, that is, they didn’t see. Our authorities, our commanders, then said to us: “They can only see those who are as small as they are. Let’s make someone as small as they are, so they can see him, and through him can see us.

“And so began a complex maneuver of distraction, a terrible and marvelous magic trick, a malicious move from the indigenous heart that we are, with indigenous wisdom challenging one of the bastions of modernity: the media. And so began the construction of the figure named ‘Marcos’.”

Marcos was a distractor

Marcos describes himself as a distractor, a hologram, a colorful ruse… He explained that this character needed to be built to buy time to build Zapatista autonomy in Chiapas and launch initiatives that would reverberate throughout the world. “That was how it was,” he said, “until the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, the most daring and most Zapatista of all of the initiatives we’ve launched up until now.”

After the experience of the Zapatista Little School, they considered that the Marcos character was no longer necessary as either spokesperson or as distraction and that Zapatismo was ready to enter a new stage.

“Now we’re destroying the figure”

“So,” Marcos concluded, “the change or handoff of responsibilities is not because of illness or death, nor because of an internal dispute, ouster, or purging. It comes about logically, in accordance with the internal changes the EZLN has had and is having. I am not nor have I been sick, and I am not nor have I been dead. Or rather, despite the fact that I have been killed so many times, that I have died so many times, here I am again. And if we ourselves encouraged these rumors, it was because it suited us to do so.

“This figure was created and now its creators, the Zapatistas, are destroying it. If anyone understands this lesson from our compañeros and compañeras, they will have understood one of the foundations of Zapatismo.”

So Galeano can live

Finally, Marcos spoke of Solís, who wanted to be called Galeano, and whose name “Marcos” took to “disinter it.”

“We ask ourselves not what we should do with his death,” he stated, “but rather what we must do with his life.… All his tenacity, his daily punctual sacrifice, invisible to anyone other than us, was for life. I can assure you that he was an extraordinary person and that what’s more—and this is the marvelous thing—there are thousands of compañeras and compañeros like him in the indigenous Zapatista communities, with the same determination, the same commitment, the same clarity and one single destination: freedom….

“We have come, as the General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, to exhume Galeano. We think one of us must die for Galeano to live… And to satisfy the impertinence that is death, we put another name in place of Galeano so that Galeano lives and death takes not a life but just a name… That is why we’ve decided that Marcos will cease to exist today.”

All of this amounts to an original way for the Zapatistas to reaffirm their struggle in a new stage, this time without the legendary spokesperson Marcos, and from now on with the new Subcomandante Galeano.

Jorge Alonso is a researcher with CIESAS Western and envío correspondent in Mexico.

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