In this country, where politics to take place without a conviction, but also without irony, I remember about a slim, masked and armed, he who was out of the guerrilla scene in the Lacandon jungle in Mexico, with a bag of bullets at his waist but he sucked a small pipe such a dreamy poet.
He is captivating not only because he is a photogenic figure. He is charming because he, Subcomandante Marcos, is an example of a struggle with confidence but at the same time with a sense of irony, one who acts for a big change but with a sense of limits, a leader of the military wing of the Zapatista movement who attempts to understand the nature of his own struggles as a paradox .
"What should we tell is the paradox, actually it is us, "he said in an interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the English version was published in New Left Review, May-June 2001.
Indeed, there is an odd thing in the EZLN, an abbreviation for the Zapatista National Liberation Army. "Our soldiers are very different from the others, because this army advises to stop as a soldier, "Marcos siad, "A soldier is someone absurd who must use the weapon to convince others, and in that sense this movement has no future if its future is military. "
For Subcomandante Marcos, the worst which can happen to the Zapatista movement is when will he wins and sits in his power and strengthen himself by forming a revolutionary army. In 1995 Marcos had indeed said if the Zapatistas voice was heard around the world, it was because there was something new in the spirit. For this movement, the political problem was separated from the problem of taking power.
He is different from the "Che" Guevara, Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and the number of left-wing guerrillas who became his predecessors in Latin America in the '60s and '70s. Their success, Marcos said, would be a fiasco for the Zapatistas. Times have changed.
Victory of the movement and left-wing guerrillas such as in Cuba finally in the end just shows the failure or even a whopping hidden behind the mask of success. Because for Marcos, the unsolved case is the role of civil society in the middle of a dispute between "two hegemony". The first is the oppressive power which governs all things in the name of society. The second is the power against the oppressor and then when it wins it also regulates all things in the name of society.
Society itself has no role and for them life also doesn't change. In many ways, the Zapatistas is "Left" in a new sense. For the "Left" in the Marxist - Leninist tradition, Marcos ideas are not interested in taking over power, and will always choose the position as "a gadfly of the existing power" is a little like empty daydream. Is it possible to change lives without controlling the changes? And how in control without showing themselves as the most ready, the most accomplished? But for Marcos, the Zapatista basic idea is different. This movement is about to open up a space for the search path to justice, but he was crowing that he was carrying a majority vote, as the pioneer of revolutionary groups in general. "EZLN," Marcos said in an interview with Marquez, " Recognizing the real horizon of itself."
For him, "Believe that we can speak on behalf of those who are beyond the reach of us is tantamount to political masturbation."
And this is what he said in 1995, "We hope people will understand, the ideal which move us is fair, and that the path we choose is also fair, but it is not the only way. Nor is it the way the best of everything."
A liberal political philosophy that is hidden behind the opposition to neoliberal economic structure makes Zapatistas become an inspiration for the progressive people in the demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa. Maybe we can't and don't need to put Marcos in one of the existing boxes. The age and experience had taught him the necessity of irony, also when people take up arms with the will be a big change, and with it any label will seem excessive, ridiculous.
He, with the rifle in his hands and a dull red neck tie always be with the novel Don Quixote during the guerrilla. For him, Cervantes's novel was the best book of political theory, with Hamlet and Macbeth. Literature, especially poetry, especially Romancero Gitano by Federico García Lorca, first came to the guerrilla leader's living space, it came before Marx and Engels went to his head. He said to Marquez, that when he went into Marx and Engels, he had completely undermined by the literature, "its irony, and its humor".
The irony, humor : some cracks interrupt amid the tight confidence and pompously over a large agenda.
In a country where the politics take place without a conviction, but also without irony, in which not only the ideology will die, but also the ideas, where the religion does not change the political behavior, but on the contrary, where no one smile a little when recognizing the power as a tacky seat but being chased in the human comedy, yes, in this country. One such Subcomandante Marcos may be imagined as a tale of odd and unnecessary, but maybe because I remember him.
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[CZ-lacalifusa012514]
. The uniqueness of his self charisma is, he will always keep the secrets from a prison in all free city in this world. He keeps the mystery of all feelings. 
You are not given a choice to have a pretty face, such as the cute guys --- which according to them - are cool in the U.S. Congress, for example... ehehhehe ... 
(My baby, why do not you agree if I prefer him than him, hm?)
