396 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
Now he has been elevated to the role of spokesman for all of indigenous Mexico.
Even more recently (January 2006), he has dropped the Subcomandante title to as-
sume the new title of Delegado Cero(“Delegate Zero”), in an effort to strip himself of
symbolic authority in a movement that stresses egalitarianism and democratic con-
sultation. Much has been made in the mode of speculation and deprecation about
Marcos’s role in the Zapatista Movement, for he is culturally and physically non-Indian.
He is fair-skinned, light-eyed, and of European countenance. The Mexican govern-
ment gleefully revealed shortly after the beginning of the insurrection that he was in
fact a well-educated creole named Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a Jesuit-educated
leftist instructor in philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
who bailed and went to Chiapas to foment a Che Guevara–style Marxist rebellion in
the early 1980s. He has neither denied nor acknowledged these revelations, only stat-
ing that he, Marcos, was born on January 1, 1994, the date of the beginning of the Za-
patista insurrection.Figure 10.2 Poster from the
Zapatista-sponsored National
Indigenous Forum, 1996.
(Based on an original poster
in possession of Gary H.
Gossen and modified by
Bradley W. Russell.)