A few years back, the U.S. Press, with little fanfare and more by way of a great silence than actual reportage, declared that the EZLN and their charismatic spokesman Subcomandante Marcos (El Sup), had fallen from the limelight, if not from favor, in the social struggle occurring in Mexico. As is often the case, the pronouncements of our media are not exactly the truth.

Surrounded and isolated in the Lancadon Forest of Chiapas, the "first postmodern revolution,"--for a while the flavor of the month--was dismissed as futile, made irrelevant by other concerns, other revolutionary groups. Once Marcos had been "unmasked" as a former university professor, the women of Mexico ceased to swoon over him, and we all know just how important that is to political prominence. The diminishing litany of the EZLN's irrelevance dribbled off until they and El Sup disappeared from our news altogether.

In Mexico, apparently unaware of the reality described by our media, Marcos' byline appears so often in the national daily, "La Jornada," that one might think he's on staff. What Marcos writes from his jungle hideout is quoted and referred to with regularity in other papers throughout the country. Marcos is both outlaw and voice of Mexico's conscience, simultaneously fugitive from the law and statesman, poet of the dispossessed and icon of resistance.

It is strange to imagine that a leader of a revolutionary army, in a state of war with the government, is given a voice at all. No politician dares to call Marcos what he would be branded were he in the U.S.--a terrorist. Basically, no politician dares get in a war of words with the masked pundit over just who the real criminals are. Marcos remains easily the most lucid and eloquent public figure in Mexico today. Despise and fear him as they must, the ruling class prefers the time-honored method of pretending to negotiate and compromise, while carrying out their objectives under cover of black budget paramilitary operations. They desperately wish to extinguish the EZLN, but know it cannot be done in broad daylight. The oppression and lack of democracy in Mexico is too transparent. (Mexico has been recently praised by both the German and Israeli governments as making great strides towards democracy, but no one--except the U.S.--pretends they actually have one).

Recently Marcos turned his pen to events connected with the student strike at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. The University has been closed since May by radical students protesting the institution of quotas as a step toward complete privatization. The striking students (Ultras) don't have a lot of public support because of their hardened position (all or nothing) and nonconformist behavior, but it is widely acknowledged that their grievance is real. The government is under real pressure to negotiate. But of course, just like NATO and our own FBI, they are simply unable to resolve any conflict except through overwhelming force and brutal mayhem. It's just not in their programming.

Anyway, in mid-October, several hundred students blocked a major street to protest the televised media's one-sided coverage of the strike (imagine that). The authorities called out the riot police to dislodge the students from the road in the name of "automotive freedom," or something. The networks reported that the valiant "Grenaderos" had rescued the public roadways from the youthful delinquents. Everything would have been peachy, except for a photograph that appeared in La Jornada. This photo shows a brother and sister laying on the ground, she with blood streaming from her face and he being viciously kicked by three policemen. The words "Department of Public Safety" were clearly displayed on the assailants' uniforms.

A disturbed and angry Marcos devoted one of his letters to this photograph, dissecting it with a skill that should be envied by trial lawyers everywhere. He peeled it back, layer by layer, to show that what the authorities claimed was true, was not true at all. Among the most damning observations, the photo clearly shows the pair being brutalized as they sprawl on the shoulder of the road. The police, who had been called upon to eject the students from the traffic lanes, were clearly caught over the line, as it were.

Further, the sad irony that this police riot occurred in the Capitol, where the Mayor is currently a member of the leftist PRD (self-proclaimed champions of human rights), was not lost on Marcos: "Do we have the right to hope that a government headed by the PRD is actually different?"

With elections coming up in 2000, the PRD is sensitive about its image. Suddenly, PRD members of Congress are calling for the resignation of the University's president, claiming that it is his fault that the strike remains unresolved. The "secret" plan being cooked up by the authorities to retake the campus by force has been, for now, monkeywrenched.

More recently, Marcos appeared via videotape, at a roundtable, titled "Underground Culture and the Culture of Resistance." Marcos addressed the panel on the topic of "weapons of resistance." He said that the EZLN continues their resistance because "we choose not to sell ourselves nor to surrender." He continued: "There are many other groups that have also taken up the weapons of resistance ... Indigenous, workers, women, gays, lesbians, students."

He spoke of other weapons besides guns and bullets. Words, art, music, "and the mountain, that old friend and companion, that joins our fight with its roads, its hiding places, its slopes, its trees, with its rains, with its sunlight, with its dawns and with its moons." He pointed out that all who would be other than cogs in the great international machinery of profit for the few are by definition rebels. "Because in this system there is a law that murders and silences those who are different. And those that live, that shout, that speak up are by definition, rebels. Transgress this law and automatically we are delinquents. Delinquents that we are, we inhabit a rebel reality, where our resistance is a bridge between our differences, and where we find our equality."

--Troy Skeels, a regular contributor to ETS!, writing from Mexico.