On the dawn of January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, a few thousand lightly armed indigenous men and women slipped through the jungle and mountains and occupied San Cristóbal de las Casas, the most touristy city in the state of Chiapas, in southeastern Mexico.
The rebels, who would become known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), were led by a white man, with his face covered and an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder, who explained the causes and goals of the movement and humorously addressed the concerns of the city's visitors: "Forgive us for the disturbance, but we are making a revolution." Shortly thereafter, he would introduce himself as Subcomandante Marcos.
The failure of state security services to uncover the identity of the mysterious and eloquent Subcomandante would soon fuel speculation about "who he is," and he, with intelligence and resourcefulness, would seize the opportunity to turn a personal question into a political statement: "Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South Africa [...] anarchist in Spain, Palestinian in Israel, indigenous in the streets of San Cristóbal [...] Jewish in Nazi Germany [...] a woman alone in the subway late at night [...] whatever bothers those in power and the complacent consciences, that is Marcos," he would write in one of the infamous lengthy postscripts that accompanied the Zapatistas' communiqués.
And later, when, after the betrayal of a former comrade, the government would publish photos of him without his mask and reveal his "real" name, he would insist that the state only knows how to lie: "I am not who they say I am, this is another life, they don't understand," he would say.
This book is the story of the legendary Subcomandante Marcos, from his radicalization in the halls of the universities of Mexico City in the 1970s, to his disappearance for ten years in the jungles of Chiapas and the preparation for war, and from there to his reappearance on the global revolutionary political scene as the 20th century came to an end.