Marcos on Argentinian TV
chiapas-l@profmexis.dgsca.unam.mx
Sun, 5 Nov 1995 06:55:50 -0600
REUTERS 11-01-95 00:48 AMT
BC-ARGENTINA-MARCOS
Zapatista chief says Mexico not interested in peace
By Stephen Brown
BUENOS AIRES (Reuter) - Sub-comandante Marcos, the leader of
the Zapatista rebels, told Argentine television in an interview
broadcast Tuesday he believes the government of Mexico is not
interested in peace, but in ``annihilation''.
The rebel chief gave a long interview to TodoNoticias cable
news in which he described in mystical terms the genesis of his
Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), but also admitted
tactical failings in the 1994 uprising. He also joked about his
soccer skills and popularity with women.
In the first two parts of an interview to be broadcast in
three parts, Marcos said Mexico's ``is not a government which is
preparing for a long peace process, it is a government preparing
for a long war, a long war of annihilation.''
The EZLN is currently committed to peace talks with the army
in the southern state of Chiapas, where it rose up on New Year's
Day 1994 to demand more democracy and more rights for the
indigenous people. More than 145 died in the following days, but
there has been virtually no bloodshed since.
Marcos, dressed in khaki fatigues, bandoliers and a black
mask covering his face, kept an automatic rifle on his knee
throughout the interview which he joked he had ``borrowed'' from
a Chiapas policeman.
Softly-spoken and with a pipe in his hand, Marcos said he
could not accept amnesty because it meant ``going back to the
same situation as if everything -- the years of preparation, the
anguish, the poverty and death -- had been for nothing.''
But the EZLN has no ambition to take power in Mexico and is
fighting a ``preventive war,'' Marcos said.
``It is not a war that tries to define positions nor
conquerors and conquered, but a war warning of a danger that is
approaching: a war with no front, terror on all sides...'' he
said.
Giving clues to his pre-EZLN identity, including a job as a
reporter and a middle-class education, Marcos told how he took
to the mountains in 1984 after flirting with politics and then
reading leftist Latin American writers such as Carlos Fuentes,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, all writing ``in
the night of fascism, of military coups.''
Of his ten years' training in the Lacandon jungle with a
guerrilla army numbering just 12 in early 1985, he said: ``You
either adapted to the jungle, or the jungle destroyed you.''
REUTER