Mexican political activist, allegedly the Subcomandante Marcos or Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, noms de guerre used by him in his capacity as the main ideologist and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a Mexican rebel movement fighting for the rights of the indigenous peoples of Mexico.
On 1 January 1994, when the U.S.–Mexico–Canada free trade agreement became effective, then Subcommander Marcos led an army of Mayan farmers into eastern Chiapas state, to protest what he saw as the Mexican federal government’s mistreatment of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Marcos is also a writer, a political poet, and an anti-capitalist who advocates the amendment of the Political Constitution of Mexico to formally and specifically recognize the political and the human rights of Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
In his youth, Guillén Vicente moved to Mexico City and graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) majoring in Philosophy. There he became immersed in the school’s heavy Marxist rhetoric of 1970s and 1980s and won an award for the best dissertation (drawing on the then recent work of Althusser and Foucault) of his class. He began working as a professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) while finishing his dissertation at UNAM, but after a couple of years left. It is thought that it was at UAM where Rafael got in touch with the Forces of National Liberation, the mother organization of what would later become the EZLN.
Guillén’s family, while deeply involved in Tamaulipas politics, are apparently unaware of what happened to him and refuse to say if they think Marcos and Guillén are the same person. Guillén’s sister Mercedes del Carmen Guillén Vicente is the Attorney General of the State of Tamaulipas, and a very influential member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party which governed Mexico for more than 70 years.
Link to Wikipedia biography