Subcomandante Marcos

Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente (born 19 June 1957) is a Mexican insurgent, the former military leader and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the ongoing Chiapas conflict, and a prominent anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal.

Guillén was born on 19 June 1957, in Tampico, Tamaulipas, to Alfonso Guillén and Maria del Socorro Vicente.

He was the fourth of eight children.

A former elementary school teacher, Alfonso owned a local chain of furniture stores, and the family is usually described as middle-class.

There he became immersed in the school's pervasive Marxist rhetoric of the 1970s and 1980s and won an award for the best dissertation (drawing on the then-recent work of Althusser and Foucault) of his class.

He began working as a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) while finishing his dissertation at UNAM, but left after a couple of years.

It is thought that it was at UAM where he came into contact with, and subsequently joined the ranks of, the Forces of National Liberation, the Maoist mother organization of what would later become the EZLN.

Debate exists as to whether Marcos visited Nicaragua in the years soon following the Sandinista Revolution that took place there in 1979, and, if he did, how many times and in what capacity.

He is rumored to have done so, although no official documents (for example, immigration records) have been discovered to attest to this.

Nick Henck argues that Guillén "may have journeyed" to Nicaragua, although to him the evidence appears "circumstantial".

Guillén's sister Mercedes Guillén Vicente is the Attorney General of the State of Tamaulipas, and an influential member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Marcos earned a degree from the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature at the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and taught at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) for several years during the early 1980s.

The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) (Zapatista Army of National Liberation; often simply called the Zapatistas) was the local Chiapas wing of FLN, founded in the Lacandon Jungle in 1983, initially functioning as a self-defense unit dedicated to protecting Chiapas' Mayan people from evictions and encroachment on their land.

During this time he became increasingly involved with a guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Forces (FLN), before leaving the university and moving to Chiapas in 1984.

In 1984, he abandoned his academic career in the capital and left for the mountains of Chiapas to convince the poor, indigenous Mayan population to organize and launch a proletarian revolution against the Mexican bourgeoisie and the federal government.

After hearing his proposition, the Chiapanecans "just stared at him," and replied that they were not urban workers, and that from their perspective the land was not property, but the heart of the community.

While not Mayan himself, Marcos emerged as the group's military leader, and when the EZLN, acting independently of the FLN, began its rebellion on 1 January 1994, he served as its spokesman.

Known for his trademark ski mask and pipe and for his charismatic personality, Marcos coordinated the EZLN's 1994 uprising, headed up the subsequent peace negotiations, and played a prominent role throughout the Zapatistas' struggle in the following decades.

After the ceasefire the government declared on day 12 of the revolt, the Zapatistas transitioned from revolutionary guerrillas to an armed social movement, with Marcos's role transitioning from military strategist to public relations strategist.

He became the Zapatistas' spokesperson and interface with the public, penning communiqués, holding press conferences, hosting gatherings, granting interviews, delivering speeches, devising plebiscites, organizing marches, orchestrating campaigns, and twice touring Mexico, all to attract national and international media attention and public support for the Zapatistas.

Marcos made his debut on 1 January 1994, the first day of the 1994 Zapatista uprisings.

According to Marcos, his first encounter with the public and the press, occurred by accident, or at least was not premeditated.

Initially, his role was to have been to secure the police headquarters in San Cristóbal de las Casas.

However, with the wounding of a subordinate, whose duty it was to transport the weapons just captured from the police station to the central town square where most of the Zapatista troops were amassed, Marcos took his place and headed there instead.

As a group of foreign tourists formed around Marcos, the only English-speaking Zapatista at hand, others, including members of the press, joined the throng.

Marcos spent from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., intermittently interacting with tourists, townsfolk, and reporters, and gave four interviews.

In 2001, he headed a delegation of Zapatista commanders to Mexico City to deliver their message on promoting indigenous rights before the Mexican Congress, attracting widespread public and media attention.

In a 2001 interview with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo, Guillén described his upbringing as middle class and "without financial difficulties", and said his parents fostered a love for language and reading in their children.

While still "very young", Guillén came to know of and admire Che Guevara — an admiration that would persist throughout his adulthood.

Guillén attended high school at the Instituto Cultural Tampico, a Jesuit school in Tampico.

Later he moved to Mexico City and graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), majoring in philosophy.

Widely known by his initial nom de guerre Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (frequently shortened to simply Subcomandante Marcos), he has subsequently employed several other pseudonyms: he called himself Delegate Zero during the Other Campaign (2006–2007), and since May 2014 has gone by the name Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano (again, frequently with the "Insurgente" omitted), which he adopted in honor of his fallen comrade Jose Luis Solis Lopez, his nom de guerre being Galeano, aka "Teacher Galeano".

Marcos bears the title and rank of Subcomandante (or "Subcommander" in English), as opposed to Comandante (or "Commander" in English), because he is under the command of the indigenous commanders who constitute the EZLN's Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee's General Command (CCRI-CG in Spanish).

In 2006, Marcos made another public tour of Mexico, which was known as The Other Campaign.

In May 2014, Marcos stated that the persona of Subcomandante Marcos had been "a hologram" and no longer existed.

Many media outlets interpreted the message as Marcos retiring as the Zapatistas' military leader and spokesman.

Marcos is a prolific writer whose considerable literary talents have been widely acknowledged by prominent writers and intellectuals, with hundreds of communiqués and several books being attributed to him.

Most of his writings are anti-capitalist while advocating for indigenous people's rights, but he has also written poetry, children's stories, and folktales and co-authored a crime novel.

He has been hailed by Régis Debray as "the best Latin American writer today".

Published translations of his writings exist in at least 14 languages.