Subcomandante Marcos

Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, born 19 June 1957 in Tampico, Tamaulipas, is a Mexican insurgent best known as the former military leader and public face of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the ongoing Chiapas conflict. A vocal anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal, he first adopted the nom de guerre Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos—commonly shortened to Subcomandante Marcos—and has since used other aliases: Delegate Zero during the 2006–2007 Other Campaign; Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano from May 2014 to October 2023, taken in honor of fallen comrade Jose Luis Solis Lopez (known as Galeano or Teacher Galeano); and, since October 2023, Capitán Insurgente Marcos. His rank is Capitán (Captain), previously Subcomandante (Subcommander), because he answers to the indigenous commanders of the EZLN’s Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee’s General Command (CCRI-CG).

Early life

Guillén was the fourth of eight children born to Alfonso Guillén, a former elementary school teacher who owned a furniture store chain, and Maria del Socorro Vicente. The family is generally described as middle-class; in a 2001 interview with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo, Guillén said his upbringing was middle-class and “without financial difficulties,” and that his parents encouraged a love of language and reading. As a child, he came to admire Che Guevara, an admiration that lasted into adulthood.

He attended the Jesuit Instituto Cultural Tampico for high school, then studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) during a period when Louis Althusser’s Marxism was influential—an influence reflected in his thesis. While finishing his dissertation at UNAM, he began teaching at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), where he was introduced to the National Liberation Forces (FLN). Several key members of the FLN’s Chiapas wing, which later became the EZLN, also worked at UAM.

In 1984, Guillén left his academic career in Mexico City for the mountains of Chiapas, aiming to organize the poor, indigenous Mayan population for a proletarian revolution against the Mexican bourgeoisie and federal government. When he presented his plan, the Chiapanecans “just stared at him” and replied that they were not urban workers, and that land was not property but the heart of the community.

The EZLN, the local Chiapas branch of the FLN, was founded in the Lacandon Jungle in 1983 as a self-defense unit protecting Mayan people from evictions and land encroachment. Though not Mayan himself, Marcos became the group’s military leader. When the EZLN—acting independently of the FLN—launched its rebellion on 1 January 1994, he served as its spokesman.

The February 1995 Government military offensive

Marcos coordinated the 1994 uprising, led peace negotiations afterward, and remained central to the Zapatistas’ struggle for decades. After the government declared a ceasefire on day 12 of the revolt, the Zapatistas shifted from guerrilla fighters to an armed social movement, and Marcos’s role changed from military strategist to public relations strategist. As spokesperson, he wrote communiqués, held press conferences, hosted gatherings, gave interviews, delivered speeches, devised plebiscites, organized marches, orchestrated campaigns, and twice toured Mexico to draw national and international media attention and public support.

In 2001, he led a delegation of Zapatista commanders to Mexico City to address the Mexican Congress on indigenous rights, attracting widespread attention. In 2006, he made another public tour called The Other Campaign. In May 2014, Marcos declared that the persona of Subcomandante Marcos had been “a hologram” and no longer existed, which many media outlets interpreted as his retirement as the Zapatistas’ military leader and spokesman.

Political and philosophical writings

Marcos is a prolific writer whose literary talents have been widely praised by prominent writers and intellectuals. He has authored hundreds of communiqués and several books, most of which are anti-capitalist and advocate for indigenous rights, but he has also written poetry, children’s stories, folktales, and co-authored a crime novel. Régis Debray has called him “the best Latin American writer today.” His writings have been translated into at least 14 languages. Debate exists over whether Marcos visited Nicaragua in the years after the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, and if so, how many times and in what capacity—it is rumored but not officially confirmed.