24 Facts About Subcomandante Marcos

In 2006, Subcomandante Marcos made another public tour of Mexico, which was known as The Other Campaign.

In May 2014, Marcos stated that the persona of Subcomandante Marcos had been "a hologram" and no longer existed.

Many media outlets interpreted the message as Subcomandante Marcos retiring as the Zapatistas' military leader and spokesman.

Subcomandante Marcos is a prolific writer whose considerable literary talents have been widely acknowledged by prominent writers and intellectuals, with hundreds of communiques and several books being attributed to him.

Subcomandante Marcos studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico during a time when the Marxism of Louis Althusser was popular, which is reflected in Guillen's thesis.

Subcomandante Marcos began teaching at the Autonomous Metropolitan University while finishing his dissertation at the UNAM, and somewhere during this time was introduced to the Forces of National Liberation.

Debate exists as to whether Subcomandante Marcos visited Nicaragua in the years soon following the Sandinista Revolution that took place there in 1979, and, if he did, how many times and in what capacity.

Subcomandante Marcos is rumored to have done so, although no official documents have been discovered to attest to this.

Subcomandante Marcos made his debut on 1 January 1994, the first day of the 1994 Zapatista uprisings.

However, with the wounding of a subordinate, whose duty it was to transport the weapons just captured from the police station to the central town square where most of the Zapatista troops were amassed, Subcomandante Marcos took his place and headed there instead.

Subcomandante Marcos would devise, convoke and host of the August 1994 National Democratic Convention that brought together 6000 members of civil society to discuss how to organize peaceful struggle that aimed to make Mexico freer, more just and more democratic.

On 9 February 1995, President Ernesto Zedillo, armed with this recently acquired information, publicly announced that Subcomandante Marcos had been identified as Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, and immediately ordered the Mexican military to go on the offensive and capture or annihilate Marcos and the Zapatistas.

Third, Subcomandante Marcos himself capitalized on this sudden, hostile action, issuing some eloquent communiques in which he lambasted the government's treachery, or at least duplicity, and portrayed himself as self-effacing mock heroic guerrilla.

The document concluded that the complaints of marginalized groups and the radical left in Mexico had been vented through the Zapatistas movement, while Subcomandante Marcos remained open to negotiation.

Subcomandante Marcos's writings are notable not only for their literary and philosophical depth but for their use of mythopoetic narratives as a tool for decolonial critique and Indigenous epistemology.

In 2005, Subcomandante Marcos wrote the detective story The Uncomfortable Dead with the whodunit writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Subcomandante Marcos called Brazil's current president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Nicaragua's current president Daniel Ortega, whom he once served under while a member of the Sandinistas, traitors who have betrayed their original ideals.

Marcos's popularity was at its height during the first seven years of the Zapatista uprising, A cult of personality developed around the Subcomandante based on the romantic premise of a rebel confronting the powerful in defense of society's underdogs, and an accompanying copious press coverage, sometimes called "Marcos-mania".

Zapatista events Subcomandante Marcos presided over were attended by people from all over the world by the thousands, including media organizations, and he appeared on the front pages of innumerable magazines, and on the covers of many books and DVDs.

Subcomandante Marcos was visited by Oliver Stone, Danielle Mitterrand and Regis DebrayAP, and he acted as host at the Intercontinental Encuentro For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, which drew around 5,000 participants from 50 countries, including documentary makers, academics and reporters, some of whom published the interviews that Marcos granted them on the event's sidelines.

Subcomandante Marcos's face appears on the cover of Thievery Corporation's album, Radio Retaliation.

Subcomandante Marcos experienced a general uptick in popularity in 2006 when he toured Mexico on the Other Campaign.

Subcomandante Marcos is often credited with putting Mexico's indigenous population's poverty in the spotlight, both locally and internationally.

Subcomandante Marcos has continued to attract media attention, and to be seen both in the company of celebrities and as a celebrity himself.