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01/07/2006:

"The Zapatista's Return: A Masked Marxist on the Stump"

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico, Jan. 4 - This is the oddest political campaign to emerge in Mexico in many a year.

Zapatista supporters of Subcommander Marcos awaited him in Palenque on Tuesday. In his speeches, he blames "savage capitalism" and the rich for social problems from gay-baiting to racism to domestic violence.

The candidate is a Marxist rebel leader who once started a civil war, wears a ski mask, smokes a pipe, keeps a crippled rooster as a mascot and is not on the ballot for any political office.

Yet the start of a six-month national tour led by the man known as Subcommander Marcos has all the earmarks of a run-of-the-mill campaign for political office: slogans, chants, partisan songs, rallies large and small, a campaign caravan making stops in towns and cities, jabs at other politicians, cute presentations from children and hugs from local community leaders, shaking hands with admirers over a line of bodyguards, and the occasional obligation to kiss, or at least hug, a baby or two.

Marcos, a captivating speaker who now calls himself Delegate Zero, even has a stump speech of sorts, in which he blames "savage capitalism" and the sins of the rich for everything from gay-baiting to racism to domestic violence.

He intends to deliver it all over the country in advance of the presidential election in July, trying to convince voters that there is no real difference among the three candidates from the major parties because all are going to cater to an oligarchy of business leaders.

"In the coming days we are going to hear a ton of promises, lies, trying to give us hope that, yes, things are now going to get better if we change one government for another," he said Tuesday before a crowd of 4,000 masked followers in the town square of Palenque, site of noted Maya ruins. "Time and time again, every year, every three years, every six years, they sell us this lie."

The crowd of masked supporters, many of them farmers bused in that morning, held banners with slogans like "Death to the Free Trade Agreement" and "Death to Neoliberal Globalization." A red flag with hammer and sickle flew in the crowd. Nearby someone had strung up large portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

"This is only going to change from the bottom and from the left," Marcos continued, picking up a recurrent theme. Then he promised a better, more equal world "where we can be respected for the work that we do, the value that we have as human beings, and not for our bank accounts or, let's say, a car, the type of vehicle we drive or the clothing we wear, a world where workers occupy a place that they deserve."
nytimes.com

These people just don't get that the threat the Zapatistas pose to the powers that be is all the greater because they are NOT hammer and sickle Marx and Lenin Marxists, but reflect indigenous values.