Catch
Nerves of Steel
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Dodge
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (allegedly born June 19, 1957 in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico), also known as Delegado Zero in matters concerning the Other Campaign, describes himself as the spokesperson for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) but, due to his prominence in the EZLN, he is considered by many to be one of its main leaders.
The Mexican government believes Marcos to be Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente. Guillén attended high school at Instituto Cultural Tampico, a Jesuit school in Tampico, Tamaulipas, where he presumably became acquainted with Liberation Theology. Guillén later moved to Mexico City where he graduated from the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), then received a masters' degree in philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and began work as a professor at the UAM. After that he left (possibly to begin his revolutionary activity). While Marcos has always denied being Rafael Guillén, Guillén's family are unaware of what happened to him and they refuse to say if they think Marcos and Guillén are the same person or not. Guillén's family is deeply involved in Tamaulipas politics. Guillén's sister, Mercedes del Carmen Guillén Vicente, is General Attorney of the State of Tamaulipas, and a very influential member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the party that governed Mexico for more than 70 years. During the Great March to Mexico City in 2001, Marcos visited the UAM and during his speech he made clear that he had at least been there before.
Like many of his generation, Guillén was radicalised by the events of 1968 and became a militant in a Maoist organisation. However, the encounter with the outlook of the indigenous peasants of Chiapas transformed the Zapatistas' ideology, and Marcos has embraced an approach to social revolution that has been described by some as post-modernist; others argue that his philosophies and actions are more closely related to the revisionist Marxist ideals of Antonio Gramsci that were popular in Mexico during his time at university.