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, began being pblished in various Mexican journals and newspapers. They have since been disseminated around the world via the Internet and by Cinco Puntos press in the U.S. This collection of Marcos's work clearly shows--no matter one's stance on his politics--why he has become an international phenomenon: he is a writer of rare ability. As a political analyst and propagandist, Marcos offers trenchant analyses of the plight of the native people of Mexico, their neglect by a corrupt national government and the exacerbation of their poverty and marginality, according to him, as "neoliberalism"--i.e., international finance--permeated that nation. But he moves easily to romantic realist musings on his life in the remote mountains of Chiapas and the path that led him to the role of rebel. Finally he becomes a fabulist, writing his own brief tales--at times achingly poetic, at other times laugh-out-loaud funny--and retelling the ancient myths and legends from Mexico's Mayan past. Though the pieces here are, in the end, difficult to categorize, what connects them is Marcos's' commitment to making the indigenous people visible, revealing the poverty of their lives and the richness of their traditions. He writes, "Being silent, our voice was passing away." Marcos has broken that silence in language as strong as dignity and as subtle as love. To read this collection is to discover that rare animal: an original voice.

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guns made of wood. Within hours they had captured six large towns. The rebellion, they explained, was timed to concur with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which signified a death sentence for the natives of Chiapas, whose lands contain vast reserves of oil, uranium, and exotic timber. Their demands were simple: Nothing for us, everything for everybody. Using a minimum of violence and exploiting the possibilities for unfettered communication offered by the World Wide Web, the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN) has since provided an indispensable model for the struggle against neoliberal globalization that has galvanized popular imagination the world round. Now, seven years into the Zapatista revolt, Seven Stories Press has released Our Word Is Our Weapon, the most comprehensive collection of writings by EZLN spokesman Subcomandante Marcos to date. A modern-day Che Guevara who gave up the comfort of urban academic life for a harsh existence among the disenfranchised, poverty-stricken indigenous communities of Mexico's southernmost state, Marcos writes with unhindered passion, poetic lyricism, and a refreshing dose of humor. In the opening chapter of Our Word he provides intimate character descriptions of a dozen comrades-in-arms - Tzotzil, Tzeltal, and Chol women commanders, soldiers, and nurses who led the EZLN's midnight offensive - and the road that led them to rebellion. What follows is a hundred chapters' worth of incisive socioeconomic analyses of Mexico and its subservient status vis-à-vis its northern neighbor; communiqués to the federal government and the press; speeches; philosophical entreaties; letters to the likes of Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Eduardo Galeano; age-old regional fables rife with symbolism; and humorous, personal accounts of daily life as a Zapatista. In keeping with the Zapatista struggle, Our Word Is Our Weapon is the end result of a five-year-long collective effort among half a dozen contributors and countless activists. Seven Stories Press's Greg Ruggiero and editor Juana Ponce de León took meticulous care in ensuring a loyal translation of Marcos's writings, even traveling to Chiapas on two separate occasions. The work includes comprehensive footnotes explaining historical references in the texts, as well as a detailed timeline of events, forewords by de León and renowned Portuguese writer José Saramago (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998), and an afterword by media activist and reporter Ana Carrigan, in which she provides a historical analysis of the EZLN. The end result is a book that is as useful for novices to the Zapatista struggle as it is for those who have followed the EZLN's every move with care ever since the Zapatistas first began covering their faces in order to be seen. Our Word has earned the highest of accolades from such renowned social critics, writers, and historians as Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Mike Davis, Eduardo Galeano, Zack de la Rocha, Kurt Vonnegut, and Martín Espada. And indeed, Our Word Is Our Weapon is a literary masterpiece that provides an invaluable lens into the Zapatista cosmos and one of the most remarkable minds of our time.

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Sunday March 4, 2001

The Observer

The words of Subcomandante Marcos in Our Word is our Weapon read like an instruction manual for the next wave of anti-capitalist protest. Our Word is our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Edited by Juana Ponce de León pp456 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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one's politics—of an indigenous uprising in the impoverished Mexican state of Chiapas. This eccentric collection of writings, which includes everything from the Zapatistas' declaration of war to magic-realist stories about a beetle named Durito, proves Marcos to be a passionate and surprisingly self-deprecating writer. Most ingenious are his attempts to cambat economic globalization in rural Mexico by appealing to trade unionists in Italy and punk rockers in the United States.

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In 1995, tens of thousands of indigenous peasants marched to the mountain town of San Andres Larrainzar, some of them across hundreds of kilometers: to show solidarity, to confront the Mexico City suits with their existence, and to catch a glimpse of Marcos, the living, breathing icon. In southern Mexico, easily the poorest region in North America, the Sub (who may indeed be a lapsed academic named Rafael Guillen) is MLK Jr., Rage Against the Machine, and Michael Jordan rolled into one. In the United States, there simply is nothing like him.

Marcos claims to have been "born in the guerrilla camp called Agua Fria, in the Lacandon Jungle, Chiapas, early one morning in 1984." But Marcos amends that he was reborn on January 1, 1994—the day NAFTA took effect. That morning, the scrubby Zapatista "army" occupied six cities and towns in southern Mexico. And so it was that an alleged renegade PoliSci prof became a folk hero.

Unlike most folk heroes, Marcos is known almost entirely through his writings, which often come in the form of press releases, open letters to famous individuals, and transcribed speeches. His gift for acting locally and chatting globally is one of the things which got the Zap uprising labeled "the first Postmodern revolution" (though, in its goals, it's more accurately the last revolution that dare not speak its name, agrarian Marxist to its wealth-redistributing heart).

Our Word Is Our Weapon—a selection of his writings—is arranged in vaguely thematic sections which move back and forth through time. The first and longest, "Unveiling Mexico," offers foundation information: explanations of the uprising, analyses, histories, pleas, rants that echo the fury of insurrection. This is the most immediately "political" section, though Marcos is such an elegant prose stylist it's hard to imagine him as a politician in the familiar sense.

Other sections include his communiqués with other social and political groups; more diaristic essays; and three sections of magical-realist tinted tales. One features tales of old Don Antonio; another collects the supposed children's stories starring the beetle Durito, whom Marcos sometimes debates and always resembles.

At moments Marcos is an economist, interrelating wealth and resources in fairly digestible packages. Just as often he is a woolly poet, shaped by the persuasions of Octavio Paz and the romanticism of Neruda. Then again he is military elegist or a genuinely rousing broadside-winder. He offers the adventures of Heriberto and the other children in his rebel camp, endlessly questing for candy. A moment later he's reading the relationship between history and power like a moral philosopher. "The legend of Gregorio Cortéz, being chased by ranchers but never caught," he writes, "is the legend of history being chased by oblivion, of history always escaping and becoming collective memory." The shifting modes of Marcos's writing are endlessly remarkable—but then we are reminded that revolutionaries are not politicians, really, exactly because they haven't signed language over to a blankly capable cynicism of stump speeches and fireside chats. "The flower of the word will not die," he begins "Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle." And it flowers in every direction, sometimes chaotically.

Still, certain things remain stable. His political vision is fixed, along with the tenderness scaffolding his pissed-offness. He mentions reflexively that he is simply the speaker for a clandestine council, representing an army of almost entirely indigenous rebels. That he is not indigenous himself—he's Spanish Mexican—is a source of constant anxiety in the writing. This often takes the form of self-mockery: at his cult status, his many nicknames, his lofty goals, his big schnozz. All of this, his comical, somber, and wryly matter-of-fact voice, makes space for him to pull off the aphoristic grandeur which runs from the Gospels to the student-worker uprisings of '68 to Marcos describing himself in 1995: "Being able to possess everything in order to have nothing, he decided to possess nothing in order to have everything."

That majestic pitch always frames revolutionary demands; it's even old-fashioned. If the book is at all postmodern, it's in the absent linearity. Also absent are some rather central pieces: for example, the source of the slogan "Todos somos Marcos" ("We are all Marcos"), which explains why it wouldn't matter if he were unmasked. Also elsewhere is the similarly famed note beginning "Marcos is gay in San Francisco, a black person in South Africa, Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Isidro, an anarchist in Spain," which ends " . . . a writer without books or readers, and a Zapatista in the Mexican Southeast."

Perhaps the editors supposed everyone knew these chestnuts already. However, the book is certainly not styled as a hermetic text for the already initiated. And, despite such omissions, the selection should do as much for newcomers as adherents. If we do some assembly work, it all makes at least a complex portrait, if a fragmented and incoherent account of the ongoing Zapatista uprising.

Fortunately, there are other sources for direct reportage. John Ross's Rebellion From the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas is a useful believer's account; the brilliant, more objective journalism of Alma Guillermoprieto is collected in The Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now and the forthcoming Looking for History: Dispatches From Latin America. What's more, for the poor but wired, almost every piece in this book and plenty more are available in various online locations, such as www.springtraining.org/revolt/mexico/marcos_index.html.

The book's shortcomings are forgivable. For, after all, it doesn't aspire to give a clear history of a revolution, or to tell the story of yet another hero. It dreams of rescuing language as a furious and tender coconspirator of action; to contradict the banal rhetoric of global politicking that hopes not to conceive action but to conceal it. In this regard, at its best, the book is language at its most ambitious—a true imagining, and an invention of the real.