Subcomandante Marcos
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, 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 " can only see those who are as small as they are. Let's make someone as small...
NationalityMexican
ProfessionActivist
CountryMexico
The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world. Take care and do not forget ideas are also weapons.
We don't want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don't see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn't go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.
In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice.
In the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force.
Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying "Enough!" He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable - this is Marcos.
In previous armies, soldiers used their time to clean their weapons and stock up on ammunition. Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at any moment.
... the photographer is a thief who chooses what he steals (which, at this stage of the crisis, is a luxury) and does not democratize the image, that is to say, the photographer selects the pictures, a privilege which ought to be granted to the person being photographed.
The photographer discovers himself/herself being photographed and we can guess he is uncomfortable. Unsuccessfully he/she tries to recompose his posture and to look like a photographer taking photos. But no, he is and continues to be a spectator. The momentous fact of being photographed leads him to becoming an actor. And, as always, actors must assume a role, which is only an elegant way of avoiding to say they must choose sides, choose a faction, take an option.
For me it is clear that photography prizes should be for those being photographed and not for the photographers.
We are going to rise up to overthrow the supreme governments, to overthrow corrupt officials, to throw all the rich and powerful out of this country and begin building a new Mexico with humble, simple people.
We learned a long time ago that we should never subject ourselves to the schedules of the powerful. We had to follow our own calendar and impose it on those above.