The Political-Philosophical Currents of the 1970s in the Discourse of Subcommander Marcos

• Author: Adela Cedillo
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18787477
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 223, Vol. 45 No. 6, November 2018, 185–187

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18787477

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

185

Book Review

The Political-Philosophical Currents of the 1970s in

the Discourse of Subcommander Marcos

by

Adela Cedillo

Nick Henck Insurgent Marcos: The Political-Philosophical Formation of the Zapatista

Subcommander. Raleigh, NC: A Contracorriente, 2017.

The most recent book by Nick Henck can be seen as a second part of his Subcommander

Marcos: The Man and the Mask (2007). In Insurgent Marcos, Henck renders an intellectual

biography of Subcommander Marcos (Rafael Guillén Vicente), the spokesperson for the

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation—

EZLN) until 2013 and the most popular Latin American guerrilla icon after Che

Guevara. Henck argues that although Marcos’s ideology is inseparable from

Neozapatista discourse, scholars who have studied the latter such as Le Bot (1997),

Holloway and Peláez (1998), and Khasnabish (2010) have neglected to discuss Marcos’s

political-philosophical development. This problem is of the utmost importance for

explaining the exceptional case of a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla force that turned into an

indigenous armed social movement with a postmodern-leftist discourse. Henck con-

vincingly demonstrates that Marcos has been more than a spokesperson, translator, and

mediator for indigenous communities, since his evolving ideas from youth to the pres-

ent day are part of the fabric of Neozapatismo. Thus Insurgent Marcos adds a new piece

to the puzzle of the political genealogy of the EZLN traced by Harvey (1998), Cedillo

(2012), and Gunderson (2017), among others.

Henck delves into three issues: Guillén’s intellectual upbringing, the factors under-

lying his ideological transformation into the Subcommander, and the elements of his

development that persisted in the Subcommander’s discourse. Textual analysis of

Guillén’s graduation thesis and the Subcommander’s writings, speeches, and inter-

views leads to some original conclusions. Henck argues that Guillén learned to under-

stand the world through the prism of literature and that this was his most striking

legacy to Marcos. As a student of philosophy, he was indebted to Althusserian Marxism,

Foucauldian structuralism, and post-Marxism. The Subcommander’s analysis of capi-

talism, neoliberalism, and globalization hint at Marxist influences although replacing

most of the Marxist terminology. For instance, Marcos maintains the theory of the

exploitation of labor but declines to talk about proletarians, speaking instead of los de

abajo (those from below). He also rejects “revolution” in favor of “revolt” and “rebel-

lion.” Nevertheless, Henck sees a certain “conceptual continuity or at least the persis-

tence of political-philosophical preoccupations” (248) that place Marcos within Marxism

broadly speaking. Whatever it means to be a Marxist today, Henck refutes attempts to

demonstrate that Neozapatismo is largely independent of Marxism.

Adela Cedillo is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at the University of Wisconsin–

Madison and coeditor (with Fernando Herrera Calderón) of Challenging Authoritarianism in

Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982 (2012).

787477LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18787477Latin American PerspectivesCedillo / Book Review

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