Content area
Full text
Subcommander Marcos: the Man and the Mask Nick Henck Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2007 ISBN 976-0-8223-3995-3, £14.99p, 499 pages, 18 illustrations and three maps.
As Nick Henck acknowledges, writing a biography of the 'Sub' is a tricky business. Marcos has played games with journalists since his dramatic entry onto the public stage in December 1993, and has usually been able to run rings round them: dazzling them with his eloquence, impressing them with his experience and evident charisma and - sometimes - just simply lying to them. For at least a year he was a genuinely mysterious figure, but in February 1995 he was unmasked by the Mexican President as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, bom in 1957, a one-time lecturer at Mexico's Metropolitan Autonomous University. This unmasking was part of a political strategy to dismiss and isolate Marcos and the EZLN as an illegitimate coalition of indigenous groups engaging in special pleading and old-fashioned, sectarian Marxist revolutionaries.
The 'Sub' who emerges in...