As the leader of an indigenous guerrilla group Zapatistas, Marcos changed the politics of Mexico as a grass-roots rebellion. Later he became a symbol of international democracy movements. “Marcos” becomes more than one person. As the words in the Between Light and Shadow: “ The construction of Character Marcos –’So then, as I mentioned, the work of constructing this character began. One day Marcos’ eyes were blue, another day they were green, or brown, or hazel, or black – all depending on who did the interview and took the picture. He was the back-up player of professional soccer teams, an employee in department stores, a chauffeur, philosopher, filmmaker, and the etcéteras that can be found in the paid media of those calendars and in various geographies. There was a Marcos for every occasion.” Marcos is an embodiment of an “Non-free media”. The movement becomes more decentralized and establishes a new wave: “Marcos, the character, was no longer necessary. The new phase of the Zapatista struggle was ready…My name is Galeano…Anyone else here named Galeano? [the crowd cries, “We are all Galeano!”] Ah, that’s why they told me that when I was reborn, it would be as a collective. And so it should be”.
The characteristic of Marcos is that he is masked. As a military force in military and public opinion, he destroys the individual of his own, and no one recognizes him. That is to say, everyone can be him, and he is likely to change. The leader of an idol has become less important. The people who are truly autonomous do not need idols, do not need leaders, only need friends, neighbors and a system that allows small communities and individuals to coexist with the collective.
Different people have different Marcos. In this sense, “Marcos” is no longer a person’s name, but a symbol of struggle and creation; the battle strategy that Marcos adopted is irrelevant. Even he thinks, not light, just flashing / not a path, just a footprint / not a guide, just one of the paths to tomorrow. This is what we are trying to explore is the reason for the rise of the Zapata movement and its significance to us.
As Taylor points out, after Marcos publicly absented himself, the figure of Marcos is no longer important: “Why was “Marcos” no longer necessary? The man formerly known as Marcos gave a few indications. Various shifts had tilted the center of the movement in a different direction. …The younger generation, born into Zapatismo, was taking the lead. Moreover, the movement was re-indigenizing itself—shifting decision making to its indigenous leaders and developing other, more horizontal, leadership strategies (“rule by obeying”)”. Marcos can be seen as a universal impulse in the different groups all over the world: “Marcos” reactivated the trickster’s potential of enormous trans-possibility: trans-race, trans-gender, trans-personal, trans-national, trans-historical”. Marcos could never be killed anymore: he never lived nor died.
Dominguez suggests the Zapatista is a postmodern revolution because “ they had somehow accomplished, by ripping into the electronic fabric, this possibility of expanding a network and manifesting a network without having access to a network”. The Zapatistas challenged Dominguez’s definition of electronic civil disobedience: “But there was this other aura that I felt that the Zapatistas, whether by purpose, by intent, or by accident, were calling for the strengthening of what I would call electronic disturbance, electronic civil disobedience. They seemed, in their network intergalactico, to be creating a platform that I had not imagined. In the same way they ripped into it, I was ripping into the space they had created. That aura was that somehow there could be a possibility of interconnecting real bodies embedded outside of the grid as a direct manifestation of the ethics and aesthetics of how networks and tactical media should really respond: not as anonymous, techno-driven cells who took on the power of whatever the issues were, but really a bridging between those who are most marginal outside the system and those systems that seemed to be the site of new power. And that they could really reconfigure it at a distance what was important about that element: we could dislocate it and reconfigure it”. Internet makes people easy to assess the cyberspace. The contestation movement redefined the possibility of electronic disturbance. Launching information war weapons is a postmodern revolution of aesthetics and electronic civil disobedience. It is poetic and it has already surpassed the definition of cyberwar, cyberterrorism, cybercrime. As Dominguez said “So I think that digital Zapatismo allowed a conversation to manifest itself around what these gestures were. And also what emerged at the end of 98 was that digital Zapatismo was then able to try to translate through its practices of electronic disturbance theater into the growth of hacktivism”.
The story of Marcos is still continuing. In Our Word is Our Weapon, the indigenous groups struggling and eager to liberation, will be forever memorized, and influence more and more international decentralized movements towards social justice: “. . . in which Marcos, in an attempt to raise awareness of what is truly at stake in Chiapas and in Mexico, points to the institutionalized corruption of values that encourages the incursion of globalization into their nation and betrays all Mexicans. . . . in which the indigenous voice of resistance and dignity speaks through Marcos, and Marcos speaks of the indigenous life and spiritual values that sit at the heart of their communities and at the heart of Mexico. . . . in which war is declared against oblivion and prejudice”.
