Subcomandante Marcos
Subcomandante Marcos or Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, was the nom de guerre used by the main ideologist and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a Mexican rebel movement fighting for the rights of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Subcomandante Marcos, the character, the constructed persona, the hologram, the "colorful ruse," was created by the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee of the Zapatistas, because "[the outsiders] can only see those who are as small as they are. Let’s make someone as small as they are, so that they can see him and through him, they can see us." Determined by the Zapatistas to have become a distraction, the figure announced it to be destroyed in late May 2014. Resurrecting the name of a fallen Zapatista education promoter named José Luis Solís López, or Compañero Galeano, who was killed in a paramilitary attack against La Realidad, a Zapatista village, also in May 2014, Subcomandante Marcos is now known as Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Twenty years prior, on January 1, 1994, when the U.S.–Mexico–Canada free trade agreement became effective, then Subcommander Marcos led an army of Mayan farmers into eastern Chiapas state, to protest what he saw as the Mexican federal government's mistreatment of the nation's indigenous peoples. Marcos is also a writer, a political poet, and an anti-capitalist who advocates the amendment of the Political Constitution of Mexico to formally and specifically recognize the political and the human rights of Mexico's indigenous peoples. Journalists have described Marcos as both a post-modern and new Che Guevara. In his military capacity as a Subcommander of the Zapatista Army, his nom de guerre Marcos is that of a friend killed at a military road-block checkpoint. In his political capacity, he is known as Delegado Cero (Delegate Zero) for his participation in the affairs of La otra campaña (The Other Campaign), concerning the communitary autonomy and the socio-political rights of los indios de México (the indigenous peoples of Mexico). On May 25, 2014 at 02:08 he published a letter where he announced that that would be his last public appearance. He mentioned that the Subcomandante Marcos personality has been a hologram and the EZLN does not need his image anymore. The letter is signed by Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano who died a few days earlier in an ambush. It is said that Galeano mentioned that he would have returned in collective form.