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As a result of the highly publicized march of a group of leaders of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) to Mexico City from the country's southern state of Chiapas, where they launched a violent uprising in January 1994, the armed and hooded rebels are being heard this week by the Mexican Congress on their demands on behalf of the indigenous population, which seek to provide them with cultural, social and economic rights that could open the way to a virtual institutional separatism.
This will be the culmination of a process that began seven years ago and whose beginnings have not been fully exposed. The world media billed the EZLN as "indigenous", but what is known about it shows that it was the creation of leftist international experts in political public relations that rallied to help the remnants of Mexico's outlawed Communist Party in building up this movement.
Seeking to gain a newsworthy image for the movement, they advised that its leaders create an air of mystery for themselves by covering their heads with ski-masks, and that their visible chief call himself "Sub-Commandant Marcos", a rank that suggested the existence of a covert maximum chief (of whose motives and temperament we could only speculate) and a name which, although not one the most popular in Mexico, is easy to handle in any language around the world.
The advisers also set up the system of faxes and Internet connections with which immediately the EZLN launched worldwide its "First Declaration from the Lacandona Jungle", which was followed with a propaganda barrage around the world. And they astutely concocted the name of Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN, (after Emiliano Zapata, a 19th-century hero of the Mexican revolution), thus creating for the group something other rebel groups do not enjoy since the day of the Sandinistas: a handle, "Zapatistas", which makes it easy for the media to refer to the EZLN without characterizing it as a guerrilla group.
The EZLN attempts to sell itself as a movement that emerged in all its purity among the indigenous people in the jungles of Chiapas. But we know now that "Marcos" is really Rafael Sebastian Guillen, a Marxist middle-class university professor who is not a member of the indigenous population, and that he is indeed the top commander.
Approximately 57 percent of personal income in Mexico is received by 20 percent of the population, while the poorest sector, which is more than 25 percent and includes a majority of the indigenous people, receives only 4 percent of the national income.
Given this, as a political movement the EZLN had no difficulty in finding an echo in Mexico and abroad. However, the EZLN lost much of this tactical advantage-could it be they have stopped listening to their public relations advisors?-when they rejected a meeting with President Vicente Fox if in advance he didn't meet all their demands (that the military withdraw from Chiapas, that all Zapatistas be released and that Congress pass the Indian rights law) and refused an invitation to speak before a congressional committee (they would only speak at a plenary session). The insurgents had decided they would return to their hideouts in the jungle to "seek new ways for their struggle" when at the last minute Congress agreed to hear them in a plenary session.
But a rich political paradox that doesn't escape Mexicans, no matter how poor they may be, is that 24 armed and hooded EZLN leaders are being heard this week by Congress thanks to the vote of lawmakers from the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The irony is that the PRI is the party that Mexicans kicked out of power last year, ending its seven-decade grip on the presidency as they backed with their vote Fox's plans for economic growth aimed at improving living standards for everybody through structural reforms and the uprooting of the corruption with which the PRI has plundered government funds.
Once it is listened to by Congress, which way will the EZLN go if the government doesn't pay attention to its demands? If professor Guillen, a.k.a "Sub-Commandant Marcos," can be believed, it will not lean towards armed struggle.
"We are not going to go into military action . . ." he said to Hernando Alvarez, an interviewer from Britain's BBC, who then asked him: "And what is going to happen with you and the Zapatistas if finally you don't get the indigenous rights and culture law passed? Will you return to the jungle?"
"Of course. Our specialty is to wait and resist. We would wait again for somebody to appear that would had the will to find a solution," was Guillen/Marcos's answer. And to Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who interviewed him, he said: "If the EZLN continues as an armed force, it is destined for failure."
What this means is that for the foreseeable future the EZLN has written itself out of Mexican politics.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com